


when you are close to me, i shiver - the slightly censored version

by ChancellorGriffin



Series: Welcome to the Rare Pair Trash Bin, Population: ME [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-31
Updated: 2016-05-31
Packaged: 2018-07-11 11:21:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7047619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I rewrote the bellabby ot3 fic with no kellamy and less gratuitous abby/bellamy sex upon request from my best friend who wanted a version of it that didn't like make future bellarke COMPLETELY out of the question.  so this ends very differently but is mostly the same, just with less porn.  not ZERO porn.  but, you know.  LESS.</p><p>Set pre- and during S3.  Gina is Raven’s girlfriend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when you are close to me, i shiver - the slightly censored version

**Author's Note:**

  * For [museumofflight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/museumofflight/gifts).
  * Inspired by [when you are close to me, i shiver](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6745573) by [ChancellorGriffin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ChancellorGriffin/pseuds/ChancellorGriffin). 



 

## Chapter One

The Rover was Raven and Sinclair’s first project, after the citizens of Camp Jaha – or, as the newly-convened Earth Council had just decided to name it, “Arkadia” – finally resigned themselves to the necessity of returning to Mount Weather to collect supplies, and it changed everything.  The upside was that trips which used to take crews of half a dozen, walking all day, hauling food and equipment back in handheld carts, now took only a few hours and could be done with two people.

The downside was that so far, only two people had been trained to drive it.  And today, Raven was rewiring a whole bank of electric stoves for the kitchens, which meant Abby was stuck with Bellamy.

Abby didn’t quite know why it was that the two of them had never been comfortable around each other.  She had made cautious inroads with most of the others, after they returned from Mount Weather and the newly-mixed community of Sky People and the remaining members of the 100 began to realize that they weren’t two separate worlds anymore.  Monty Green liked her, which helped, and she’d always been close with Raven.  Jasper Jordan couldn’t be around anyone who reminded him of Clarke, which made his medical checkups a trial, but it was impossible for Abby to blame him.  Even Octavia, who didn’t seem to care for anyone from the Ark at all, had seemed, at least a little, to be beginning to thaw.

But Bellamy was different, and she didn’t quite know why.

Or, rather, that wasn’t quite true.  She knew exactly why.

But she couldn’t say it.

Neither of them could say it.

Neither of them had said her name out loud since the day she turned her back on the gates of Camp Jaha, walked into the woods and disappeared.

* * *

 

He didn’t come inside with her.  He never did, unless he had to.  When Raven drove, she would follow Abby on her rounds through the Mount Weather medical facility and storage rooms, pushing a cart and making small talk while Abby collected boxes of syringes and antibiotics.  It helped, to have someone else there.  It helped keep the ghosts away.

But nothing could keep the ghosts away from Bellamy, so Abby didn’t push him when she got out of the Rover and he didn’t follow.

“I’ll be here when you’re done,” he said tonelessly, and he wasn’t looking at her, he was staring straight ahead at the door in the side of the mountain, and Abby’s heart cracked a little as she watched his jaw tighten.  He didn’t unbuckle his seatbelt, didn’t even take his hands off the wheel.  He stayed there, as though ready to run.  As though at any moment that door could swing open and reveal an army of Mountain Men on the other side of it.

But there were no more Mountain Men, because Bellamy’s hand had been on that lever too.

Abby put her hand on his shoulder, startling them both, and he flinched like her touch had burned him but – surprisingly – didn’t pull away.

“I’ll be as fast as I can,” she promised him, and she felt him soften a little in relief.

It would be over soon.

Bellamy Blake lived with the ghosts of Mount Weather every day.  He coped the best he could.  But it helped when he didn’t have to walk across the ground where they were buried.

* * *

 

Her list for this trip, though urgent (they had almost completely run out of sterile gauze and there was a particularly nasty flu currently running through the camp) wasn’t long, and it only took her about twenty minutes to collect almost everything she needed.

The problem was that she couldn’t find the stepstool.

The storage facility at Mount Weather contained walls of 8-foot metal shelving and Abby was, to put it delicately, insufficient in height to reach anything on the top 2 shelves.  Raven had dragged in a stepladder the last time they were here, but clearly someone on Tuesday’s supply run had moved it; she hunted high and low but couldn’t find it anywhere.  But all the remaining cases of sterile gauze were on the top shelf.  She couldn’t reach them herself, she couldn’t go home without them, and she was left with only one option.

To his credit, he was polite on the walkie-talkie and didn’t complain once.  He found her in the storage unit, reached up to effortlessly lift down the case, asked her “is this the last of it?” and, when she nodded, wordlessly turned back to the door towards the Rover.

“I’m sorry,” she said.  He didn’t turn around.

“It’s fine.”

“I hated to have to ask you – “

“Don’t worry about it.”

But she watched his shoulders collapse a little under the release of tension as they stepped out of the Mountain and back into the sunlight, and she knew that even those three minutes back inside those walls had cost him something terrible.  Bellamy wasn’t going to sleep tonight, and it was her fault for not being able to reach that shelf, and Kane was gone, and he couldn’t talk to Octavia about this, and she could feel the tension radiating off of him and they still had three hours in the car together before they arrived back home, and the only person who had figured out how to play music in the Rover was Jasper.

 _Well, at least it can’t get any worse,_ thought Abby ruefully, which is exactly the kind of tempting fate that leads to the universe deciding to test that theory with a flat tire less than half a mile down the road away from Mount Weather.

* * *

 

“They’ll be here in five hours,” said Bellamy, opening the back of the Rover where Abby had piled up a heap of guard jackets to take a nap.  The cab of the Rover was open to the elements, and it would be dark soon, and Abby was beginning to get cold.  But the back was designed for storage transport, which meant it was watertight and well-insulated.  She’d closed the sliding panel that separated it from the cab, switched on the emergency lantern, and had sat down to wait while Bellamy radioed Sinclair.  The team was on the way with both a spare tire, and six people pushing supply carts, in case they had to leave the Rover and bring the medical equipment back on foot.  “I’ll be in the front if you need me.”

“Bellamy, it’s freezing.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re so afraid I’m going to say her name that you can’t even be in the same room with me,” said Abby, the words tumbling out of her before she even realized what she was staying.  He froze with his back to her.  “You’re so angry at her that you can’t even see straight,” she went on.  “You’re so angry at her, you’re angry at me.”

“I’m not angry,” he said, in a gruff, harsh voice, and even though she couldn’t see him she could tell that he was crying.

“Would it help,” she said, “if I told you that sometimes I’m angry too?”

This got him to turn around.  She held out her hand.

“It’s freezing outside,” she said again, “and it’s freezing in the front seat.  Will you please just come inside?”

He hesitated for a long moment, then reluctantly climbed into the back of the Rover and closed the door behind him, sealing them into warm darkness, illuminated only by the blinking lights of Bellamy’s radio and the soft glow of the emergency lantern.

Abby didn’t press her luck right away.  She’d gotten him, at least, to acknowledge her.  She’d gotten far enough that he seemed, for the moment, no longer so furiously desperate to be alone.  So she didn’t push him to talk just yet.  She just sat, knees drawn up in front of her, back braced against the walls of the Rover, pulled a protein bar out of her backpack, and let Bellamy get used to her.

They sat in silence – though not a totally uncomfortable one – for nearly half an hour before they heard the first thunderclap.  Their eyes met with the same twinge of panic, which was confirmed about five minutes later when Sinclair radioed back to tell them a storm was on the way.

“The emergency case in the back has blankets and food rations and water,” he said.  “Sit tight until morning.”

Bellamy clicked the radio off and looked up at Abby.

“I swear to God,” he said, “if you somehow cooked up a thunderstorm to trap me in the back of this goddamn truck to get me to talk about my feelings – “

Abby burst out laughing.  After a minute, she saw a fraction of a smile begin to tug at the corner of Bellamy’s mouth.  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile,” she observed, and he raised an eyebrow but didn’t disagree.

“Not a lot of laughs around Camp Jaha these days,” he pointed out, which was impossible to disagree with, and she conceded with a shrug.

“We don’t have to talk about Clarke,” said Abby.  “But I think we should talk about you.”

“No thanks,” said Bellamy.

“You don’t talk,” she said.  “To anybody.”

“I talk plenty.”

“You know what I mean.”

“You a therapist now?” he asked, a flicker of irritation beginning to show through.  She reached back into her backpack and pulled out a flask of moonshine.

“No,” she said.  “But I’d like to be your friend.”

He looked from the flask to her and back again, as if unsure whether taking the flask signaled a commitment of some kind to a deeper intimacy than he was comfortable with.  But they were stuck in the storage compartment of a truck being pummeled with hailstones, so in the end he sighed and took a long, deep swig before reaching back across the crates of supplies to pass it back to her.

“Okay,” she said with a smile.  “That’s a start.”

“You gonna make me talk now?”

“We have twelve hours to kill,” she pointed out.  “If you want, I can go first.”

* * *

 

The moonshine helped.

Four hours later, the bottle half empty, they had made slow but definite progress.  Abby was pleased.

They didn’t talk about Clarke at all, or Mount Weather, or anything that had happened since the 100 landed.  They talked about the Ark instead – about their childhoods (Abby remembered Aurora Blake with no great fondness, and her impressions were not improved by Bellamy’s stories), about books, about the way life used to be.  Abby surprised herself by opening up about Jake, and Bellamy surprised her by listening, his eyes compassionate and warm on hers.

At some point, she didn’t recall how long ago, she had pulled off her socks and boots and jacket to get more comfortable, and crawled over to the emergency supply box to pull out blankets for both of them, coaxing Bellamy to shed his stiff guard jacket for a blanket instead.  And for reasons she could not have explained, instead of returning to her seat across from him, she sat down beside him instead.

He tensed up at the close proximity, but he didn’t move away.

“Here,” she said, passing him the blanket and helping him tuck it around him.  “Now you’ll be plenty warm.”

He looked at her with something unreadable in his eyes, and she felt her heart contract a little bit.  “What?” she asked him.

He shook it off.  “Nothing,” he said, and turned away.

“Bellamy.”

“It’s just – “  He stopped, his jaw clenching and unclenching.  Abby didn’t push him, simply sat patiently and waited.  His hand was resting on the metal floor, next to her own, and after a moment, she took it in hers.  He didn’t pull away.  “It’s just been a long time since someone was nice to me,” he said, and something inside Abby shattered.

“Come here,” she said firmly, and pulled him into her arms.

Bellamy wasn’t comfortable with hugging, and she felt him stiffen instantly.  The talking, the light touch of her hand, the closeness, all these things he’d been able to bear just fine.  But the moment Abby took him in her arms he tensed up like a panicked wild animal in flight.

“You’re not a monster,” she murmured quietly into his soft dark hair, her hands warm and comforting on his back, and she knew from the way he collapsed against her that she had read him correctly.  It had been the right thing to say.

“Jasper can’t even look at me,” he said in a rough voice, muffled by her shoulder.  “Octavia won’t talk to anyone but Lincoln.  And all the others, they all know what I did.”

“You saved us,” she said quietly.  “You and Clarke and Monty.  You saved us.  That’s what you did.”  She took his face in her hands and lifted it up so he could look at her, so she could look into his eyes, because this was important and he needed to hear it.  “Bellamy, I would be dead if it wasn’t for you,” she said frankly.  “We all would be.  Marcus, Raven, Harper, Miller – every last one of us.  We would all be dead.”  He cast his eyes downward, unable to meet her gaze.  “You’re not a monster,” she said.  “You’re a good man.  That’s why it feels like this.  That’s why it hurts.  That’s why you feel the weight of all those lives.  You think that’s what makes you a monster, but you’re wrong, Bellamy, you’re completely wrong.  It doesn’t make you a monster.  It’s the way that you know that you’re not.”

Her hand on his cheek was warm and gentle, and after a long moment she coaxed him back up to look at her.  “It will get better,” she murmured.  “I’ve been where you are, Bellamy, and so has Marcus.  Trust me.  None of us have clean hands, but we’re all doing the best we can.”  He didn’t fight back the tears spilling down his face – he seemed hardly even to notice them – and he didn’t resist as she reached up to brush them away.  “You have a good heart,” she said, her voice low, drawing him so close to her that their foreheads were nearly touching.  “You’re a good man.  That’s why it feels like this.”

He closed his eyes, and she looked at his dark eyelashes glittering with tears, and she did the most inexplicable thing she had ever done in her life.

She lifted his face to hers, and kissed him.

His lips parted beneath hers instantly, even as she felt his muscles beneath her hands tense in startled astonishment.  His mouth worked hungrily beneath hers, kissing her back with incredible force as though he couldn’t help himself, but his whole body was rigid, stiff, unyielding.  He was being pulled in two directions, unsure which way to go, unsure whether to lean into her or pull away.  But her lips were impossibly soft, insistent, persuasive against his, her arms were warm and strong, and no one had ever held Bellamy Blake like this in all his life.  No one had ever touched him with this kind of tenderness.  And slowly, slowly, she felt the panicked, tightly-coiled fight-or-flight reflex of his body begin to ease.  One hand slid up to caress his hair, gently, affectionately, and it made him shift almost imperceptibly towards her. He liked that.  He liked to be touched.  She suspected he was starved for it.  So with one hand she stroked his hair, thick and soft beneath her questing fingers, and she ran the other lightly, soothingly, up and down his arm, the way she would soothe a frightened animal to keep it from bolting.   _You’re safe,_ her touch said.    _I’ve got you.  I’m right here._

“Abby,” he said uncertainly as her mouth drifted from his lips to his cheek to trail kisses down his throat.  “I don’t know if – “  But his voice broke off as she nuzzled softly into the hollow of his collarbone, and a faint sound that was almost a sigh escaped him.

“I can stop,” she whispered into his ear, “if you want me to stop.”  He didn’t answer. “Bellamy, do you want me to stop?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered back, a faint tremble in his voice.  “I don’t know.”

She sat back up to look into his eyes, dark and turbulent and full of emotion, and she took his face in both her hands.  “Talk to me,” she said.  “Tell me what you want.  Tell me what you need, Bellamy, and I’ll do it.”

He couldn’t answer her.  He was staring at her, a thousand different emotions wrestling across his face.  There was desire, clearly – the kiss had stirred something inside him, and she could see from the way his breath was rapid and shallow that he was in the grip of a powerful longing to pull her close and kiss her again.  But there was confusion, too, tinged with something like fear or mistrust or even suspicion.  It was the face of someone who knows perfectly well that anyone, at any time, can walk away and leave you.  He was afraid to ask for what he wanted because he didn’t trust her.  He didn’t trust anybody.

She was going to have to take this very, very slow.

She pressed another soft kiss against his mouth and stroked his cheek, feeling his clenched jaw soften beneath his touch, but he still couldn’t bring himself to move towards her.  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said gently.  “I’ll be right here, whenever you’re ready.”

Then she shifted her weight, sitting back on her heels to give him a little space, and very slowly pulled her sweater off over her head.

If she had had any doubts about how the kiss had made Bellamy feel, they dissolved instantly at the way his eyes raked greedily, hungrily over her breasts inside her faded black cotton bra.  “What are,” he started to say, then stopped and swallowed hard to compose himself.  “What are you doing?” he tried again, fighting to keep his voice steady.

“We have twelve hours to kill,” she said.  “I’m planning to sleep for at least some of them.  Are you?”  He nodded.  “Were you going to sleep in your uniform?”  He looked away.  She sighed.  “Oh for God’s sake,” she said, exasperation tinged with fondness in her voice.  “You were going to sleep in your uniform sitting up in the driver’s seat all night long, weren’t you?”  His awkward silence was confirmation.  “All right,” she said firmly.  “If nothing else, Bellamy Blake, I am going to make sure you actually get a good night’s sleep.”

“I don’t sleep much,” he said, and from the way he couldn’t quite look at her – like he was confessing something shameful – she guessed that the nightmares were worse than she had thought.

“Take your boots off,” she said to him, and something in being given simple instructions rather than being asked to make a complex emotional decision seemed to resettle him a little.  So he did.  Abby unfastened and removed her jeans, which Bellamy couldn’t quite bring himself to watch, shyness radiating off him in waves.  Then she took the heap of jackets she’d been napping on earlier, spread it out a little to make room for two, and lay down with her blanket on top of her.  He seemed to relax, a little, with her bare skin covered.  “Take off your shirt,” she said to him, and he did, and then it was her turn to stare.

His chest was perfect, smooth and tight with hard powerful muscles.  He could feel her looking at him, and it the shyness emanating from him grew.  He was a handsome guy, and she knew – from things she’d picked up here and there around camp – that he’d never had a problem getting girls to go to bed with him.  It wasn’t the feeling of a woman staring openly at his bare chest that made him strangely timid.  It was the fact that Abby _saw_ him.

He took off his jeans without being prompted – mostly, she suspected, because it distracted him from looking at her – and then, after a long, long moment of indecision, he crawled underneath Abby’s blanket, draping his own on top of hers.  All in all, it was far from the most uncomfortable bed either of them had ever had.

Bellamy lay stiffly on his back, staring up at the roof of the Rover.  Abby shifted her weight to lean onto his chest and gently stroke his face with her soft fingertips.  “Bellamy,” she said softly.  “We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.”

“Will you just,” Bellamy began, and then stopped, as though he’d almost frightened himself.

“It’s okay,” she murmured gently.  “Tell me, Bellamy.  You can say it.”

But he couldn’t ask, he couldn’t say the words, his cheeks were flushed red with furious mortification as if he’d already revealed too much by admitting he wanted anything at all.  So she took a shot in the dark.

“What if I just hold you?” she said softly.  “Was that what you meant?”  He froze a little, and gave the faintest of tiny, stiff nods, still not looking at her.  She smiled.  “Of course I will,” she whispered.  “Of course I will.”  She held out her arms to him and, after a long moment, he rolled over from his back to his side so he could face her, and he let her pull him close.  He was stiff and tense at first, just as he had been before, but once again, Abby’s persistence paid off.  She stroked his hair, soothing him, caressing him, until the tension in his neck and back began to ease and he lowered his head to rest against her shoulder.  “That’s it,” she murmured into his hair, and cradled him close to her chest as her other hand slid to his back, her soft warm palm sliding up and down the ridges of his spine.

He was coiled taut as a bowstring, but she could feel him soften inside her embrace, and after a few minutes had passed he tentatively wrapped one arm around her too, pulling their bodies even closer together.  “That feels good,” she murmured to him encouragingly, so he tightened his grip and pulled her closer, and she remembered something Marcus had told her once about Bellamy, after they had returned from Mount Weather.  What Bellamy needed most, Marcus had explained to her, was approval.  Reassurance.  He was always so afraid to make a mistake, afraid he had done the wrong thing.  He was always punishing himself for something.  “He needs to know we see him,” Marcus had said.  “So whenever he does something right, you should always tell him.”

“I like the way it feels when you hold me like that,” she whispered into his ear, and he pulled her even closer, so close that she could feel his strong, muscled thigh against hers.  His fingertips against her bare back were shy at first, but grew bolder, sliding down her spine to rest at the curve of her waist.

“You’re really warm,” he murmured, his voice muffled by the skin of her shoulder, and she chuckled a little.

“You are too,” she said.  “It feels really good.”

“Why are you nice to me?” he asked abruptly, and there was something a little hollow and devastated in his voice that put another little crack in her heart, so she pulled his face up to hers so she could look at him again.

“You don’t trust anyone, do you?” she asked frankly, and there was no judgment in it, no condemnation, but it was so brutally, pointedly _true_ that he couldn’t look at her anymore.  “I’m not her, Bellamy,” she said, startling the breath out of him.  “I’m here.  I didn’t run.  We’re all here.  All the rest of us.  We all love you.  And we all stayed.”

“She left you, too,” he said.

“I know she did,” said Abby.  “And I hate it.  It _kills_ me.  I miss her every day.  But I have faith that she’ll come back when she’s ready.  And I’ll be here when she is.  I’m not going anywhere,” she said, cupping his cheek in her hand.  “For her, for you, for Marcus, for all of you.  You’re never going to have to worry about me running out on you.  You’re never going to have to worry about me not being here if you need me.  I know you don’t let people in easily, Bellamy, but I’m right here.  I’m always going to be right here.”

He closed his eyes, and she could feel him begin to soften, so she pressed another soft kiss on his mouth.  “Let me in,” she whispered.  “Let me hold you.  Let me keep you warm.  I promise you’re safe.  I promise I’ll be here in the morning.”

“Abby – “

“You’re afraid to want anything,” she murmured, “because everything you ever wanted has been taken away, or destroyed.  But it doesn’t have to be like that now.  You can ask me for anything you want.  What do you want, Bellamy?” she asked him, her voice barely a whisper, and something inside him snapped.

“I want _you_ ,” he said gruffly, and then his mouth swallowed up hers in a ferocious kiss, and that was the end of the talking.

Abby hadn’t been with a man Bellamy’s age since she was his age too, and there was something so endearing in his enthusiasm.  He kissed her with his whole body, his arms tightening around her as he shifted his weight until she was flat on her back and he was lying above her, braced on his forearms and knees to avoid crushing her but still allowing her the pleasurable sensation of feeling the weight of his hard, strong young body pressing down against her.

They kissed for a long, long time.  Abby wrapped her arms tightly around his back – he seemed to like that, when she held him – while he tangled his fingers in her loose, untidy hair, spread out on the makeshift bed below her.  His lips were fuller than she’d thought, and he used them with a degree of skill that made her shiver a little with anticipation.  As his mouth drifted away from hers to make its way down her throat to her chest, she couldn’t help herself and let out a soft, contented, dreamy little sigh, which made Bellamy freeze with his mouth buried between her breasts, and even though his face wasn’t visible she could read the thoughts in his mind as clearly as if they were written on his skin.

“I want to,” she said firmly.  “Do you want to?”

There was a pause.  Then he looked up at her and nodded, almost in spite of himself, and her face broke open into a wide, delighted smile that bathed him in warmth and sweetness.  “Then we better get out of the last of these clothes,” she said sensibly, and he laughed.

“I got this,” he said, and before she could even move he had reached beneath her, unhooked her bra, discarded it, and taken her breast into his mouth, all in one fluid movement.  She made a sound that was partly a gasp of surprise, partly a moan of pure pleasure, and partly laughter.

“Nice moves,” she said approvingly, and she could feel him smiling against her skin.

“I got more.”

“Is that a promise?”

He reached down to her waist and pulled off her threadbare cotton panties, setting them aside before pulling off his own shorts as well.  “Could be,” he said archly, lowering himself back down to kiss her some more, and she laughed again.

“I like you like this,” she told him as his now-naked body pressed fervently against hers, and he gave a rueful smile.

“This is the part I’m good at,” he said, and he was partly flirting with her but also partly confessing something that he wasn’t sure how he felt about.  It was as though he was telling her that the physical act he could handle, but it was the emotional intimacy she offered that frightened him so badly.

“You’re better at the other part than you think you are,” she said.  “But you seem pretty good at this part too.”

When he kissed her this time, his body covering hers with a blissfully warm weight, his hips sank down against hers and she gasped at the startling sensation of the hot, heavy cock resting between them which it was suddenly impossible for either of them to ignore.  She felt it, and he saw that she felt it, and she liked that it didn’t embarrass him.  It was soft, still, but she could feel it begin to swell slowly into hardness against her skin.

“Lie back,” she whispered to him, pushing at his shoulders to roll him over and then kissing her way underneath the blankets down his chest to get a closer look.

“Abby, what – “ he began to say, but whatever he was going to say next died in a half-choked gasp as her warm wet mouth parted and took him inside.

His whole body went stiff and rigid with exertion again, as though fighting back against waves of pleasure.  She couldn’t speak, to tell him to breathe and relax, but she reached her hands up to where she could feel him bunching up the thick canvas fabric beneath them in tight, white-knuckled fists.  As her lips roused him with soft, wet, open-mouthed kisses up and down his thick shaft, as she swirled her tongue in dizzying circles around the ridges on the pulsing, aching tip, she rested her hands over his fists and slowly, slowly caressed them open until she could interlace her fingers with his.  It helped.  His breathing leveled out, he relaxed into her, and he began to make soft, desperate pleasure sounds as her mouth gently, painstakingly roused him to hardness.

When she finally pulled away, the sound out of his mouth was almost a whimper as she kissed her way back up his chest.  He seized her face in his hands, crashing his mouth against hers, desperate, frantic, unleashed, and then she felt him grip her shoulders and press her back against the floor.  “Let me,” he panted.  “Please.  Let me.”  She nodded, breathless, and he kissed his way down her chest to rest against the soft mound between her thighs.  She parted them wide, offering him access, and he dived in hungrily, attacking her cunt with a frantic, puppyish enthusiasm.  She gasped with startled pleasure and a hint of amusement.

“Easy,” she cautioned him, tangling her hands gently in his hair.  “Easy.  Gentle.”  He slowed down obediently, the hard wild strokes of his tongue softening to long slow gliding licks, and she purred a little with pleasure.  “That’s good,” she told him.  “Oh, that’s really good.”  Pleased with himself, he pressed a gentle kiss against her clit, causing her hips to rise upwards almost of their own volition.  “I like it right there,” she whispered, her fingers caressing his temples, stroking his thick dark curls.  “Just like that.  Kiss me there again.”  He obeyed, and was rewarded with another sharp moan and arch of her back.  “You feel so good,” she whispered, her heart racing in her chest at every stroke of his tongue.  “I love the way you do that.”

And Marcus had been right, Marcus had read Bellamy correctly, because her gentle encouragement seemed to sink into him and make him feel more sure of himself.  After a few minutes, his shyness disappeared completely, and he didn’t need her instructions anymore.  He knew exactly what to do.  He even had a few tricks she’d never even tried, like taking her clit between his lips and suckling lightly at it, which sent her into the stratosphere.

When she came, his tongue sweeping across her cunt with firm, insistent strokes, her cry was so loud that they were both desperately grateful to be trapped in a hailstorm with no human beings closer than a twelve-hour walk away.  It was a wild, high-pitched cry that startled them both, and she could see in his eyes as he climbed out from under the covers and back up to kiss her stickily on the mouth that he was equal parts aroused, and proud of himself.

“Good boy,” she said teasingly, patting his cheek, which made him laugh, and pounce on her, pinning her to the ground beneath him.

“Don’t patronize me,” he chuckled, mouth brushing against her neck.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.  “Good _man_.”

“Better.”

“You’re incredibly good at this,” she said, smiling, “for however old you are.”

“And you’re ridiculously gorgeous,” he said frankly, “for however old _you_ are.”

“That was a good answer,” she said, and he laughed and kissed her.

“It’s true,” he said.  “Why else did you think I was going to sleep in the front of the truck?”

This delighted her unreasonably.  “Really,” she exclaimed, a mischievous grin on her face.  “Is _that_ why you’re always so tense when we’re alone together?”

“Part of it,” he confessed.

“Aren’t you glad I convinced you not to sleep alone in the front seat?”

“Very glad,” he agreed, pressing a light kiss against the tip of her nose which inexplicably made her want to burst into tears.  It was such an uncharacteristically intimate gesture.  It was so open, so easy, so unlike him.  It was a side of him she wondered if anyone had seen before, beneath that shell of iron, and she couldn’t stop herself from wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his chest.

She held him like that for a long time, his warm body pressed against hers, before he shifted his weight and looked down at her with something in his eyes that was like a plea, and suddenly nothing was funny anymore, suddenly all she wanted was to open her whole self to him with infinite warmth and tenderness and take him inside of her and hold him close.  So she reached down between their bodies, grasped his now-achingly stiff cock in her small, sure hand, and gently guided him inside of her.

The shock of it was so fierce that they both gasped.  He was big, and swollen to dizzying hardness, filling her completely.  And even though he was young, and full of unbridled enthusiasm, he was still careful, gentle, precise.  He went slow, gliding in inch by inch, filling her, stretching her open, but letting her get used to the feel of him as he went.  But she could feel, from the hissing intake of his breath, that he was struggling to hold himself in check, struggling not to be overwhelmed by pleasure.  “Abby,” he groaned into her bare shoulder, and she wrapped her arms tighter and pulled him close.

“Let me take care of you,” she whispered, stroking his back, as he nuzzled deeply into her soft skin, kissing her neck and shoulders.  “You’re always the one taking care of everyone else.  Let me take care of you, Bellamy.  Let me just make you feel good.  Let me be close to you.  Just for tonight.  Will you let me do that?”  He nodded, overwhelmed, unable to look up, suddenly shy again, but Abby wasn’t.  Abby knew just what to do.

And after a moment, so did he.

Her hips rocked up towards him, sending him deeper inside her, and it lit a spark inside him, and within moments it was all panting and gasping and grunting, hands tangled in hair and scratching at backs, hips frantically careening together over and over and over, warm skin sheened with sweat.  Clutching him tightly between her thighs, to keep him from letting go, Abby rolled them both back over the other direction so Bellamy lay on his back, and she rose up to brace her palms against his chest and ride him, slow and deep, hips rolling back and forth as his gasps deepened.  The new angle made Abby feel dizzy with pleasure, sending him further and further inside her, and she leaned forward to gently stroke his sweaty hair and murmur “Just let go, just breathe” as she rode him faster and faster.

“Abby,” he gasped brokenly as she felt him begin to swell and tremble, and she smiled down at him, encouraging.

“Come for me,” she whispered, caressing his cheek and hair, and he did.  His hips bucked and writhed beneath hers in a frantic staccato rhythm that brought her to her own climax just a heartbeat after him.  Their desperate, raw moans echoed inside the metal box of the Rover, and their breath took a long, long time afterwards to finally soften back to normal.

“Oh God,” she whispered, once she could speak again, and kissed his mouth over and over.  “That felt so good.”  She caressed his cheek warmly, tenderly.  “You made me come so hard,” she whispered, and even though it made him blush, she could see that he was pleased.

“I – you were – that was really good,” he said haltingly.  “I mean like.  For me, too.  Really good.”

“I’m glad,” she smiled at him.  “That’s what I wanted.”

Before he had time to pull away, to become tense or embarrassed again, Abby rolled off of him back down onto the heap of canvas and curled up into his side, her head pillowed on his chest and her arms around him.  His arms came up unhesitatingly to wrap around her back, holding her in place, and as they lay there listening to the echo of hail on the roof of the Rover, sated and sweaty and warm and content, Abby could feel Bellamy’s breathing begin to ease into the peaceful rhythm of sleep, and she knew down to her very bones that as long as she held him, the nightmares would stay far away.

“Goodnight,” she whispered to him softly.

“Thank you,” he whispered back.

 

* * *

 

##  **Chapter Two**

They both slept soundly, better than they had in . . . weeks? Months?  No nightmares, no restlessness, no fear.  Just stillness, the sound of the rain, and perfect peace.

The warm, drowsy weight of Abby’s small body blanketing his soothed Bellamy into oblivion, and the ghosts of Mount Weather, of the Culling, of Finn and Charlotte and Wells, of all the other people he hadn’t been able to save, were as distant and remote and far away from him that night as if Clarke had taken them all with her when she left.

Abby did not dream of Jake that night either, and wasn’t awakened in the night with frenzied, panicked nightmares about Clarke.  Bellamy’s chest was solid and reassuring, something concrete and real to hold onto.  She rested her head against his warm, sweat-dampened skin, just over his heart, feeling its rhythm slow from the wild desperate pounding of orgasm into the steady, gentle pulse of sleep.

They awoke to silence.  The rain had stopped overnight, and even though it was still pitch-dark inside the Rover it was clear the storm had passed and the sunshine had returned.  They could hear birds singing in the trees around them.

“Good morning,” said Abby, as Bellamy sleepily opened his eyes, and kissed him before he could decide to feel embarrassed about last night.

But he wasn’t.  Not at all.

“Good morning,” he agreed, grinning at her, and then kissed her back so fierce and hard that she had to pull away, gasping and laughing, to catch her breath.

“How do you feel?” she asked, her tone carefully neutral, not wanting to push him to say more than he felt comfortable, but curious all the same.

“Starving,” he answered frankly, and she burst out laughing.  She reached over his chest to grab the supply packs and pull out a couple of protein bars.

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” she said, handing one to him.  Bellamy opened the back hatch of the Rover and they saw the sun was hard and gold in the sky, warm on their naked skin.   They were much too far from any Grounder settlements, or from Arkadia, for the risk of any human company, so neither of them bothered to get dressed immediately.  Instead, they ate their breakfast, walked around a little, tidied up the back of the Rover and then sat on a blanket in the grass to enjoy the sun.

“Four hours left,” said Bellamy heavily, out of nowhere, and Abby turned to look at him.

“You’re counting down until they get here,” she said, puzzled.  “Why?”

“Four more hours until I go back to being the monster that killed three hundred people,” he said, not quite able to look at her.  “Maybe Clarke was the smart one.  She doesn’t have to see them all every day.”

Abby took his hand.  “Bellamy, listen to me,” she said gently.  “You and Clarke are different.  You went through this together and you’re coping in different ways.  Clarke needed to . . . to not be around us all for a little while.  You hate it.  I hate it.  We both miss her.  It’s not what we would have wanted.  But you could have run, too, Bellamy.  You could have, and you didn’t.  You came home.  You planted roots.  You decided to stay.  That’s brave.”

“No, it’s not,” he said, and the edge of bitterness she’d heard in his voice last night threatened to creep back in, causing her heart to ache with empathy and affection.  “It’s not brave.  It’s just getting through the day.”

“Sometimes just getting through the day is an act of bravery,” she reminded him.  “You don’t give yourself any credit for what it means that you’re still alive, Bellamy.  That you’ve kept so many other people alive.  You’re only counting up the people that you lost, and not the ones that you saved.”  Her hand tightened around his, and he looked up to meet her eyes for the first time.  “You saved my life in Mount Weather,” she said softly.  “Start with that.  If you don’t remember anything else, remember that.  I’m alive _because of you._  Because you risked your life to save us.  I want you to remember that, every time you look at me.  You didn’t fail.  It was never going to be possible to save everybody.  It just wasn’t.   _You didn’t fail._  Look around at how many of your people you kept alive.  Those kids depended on you, and on Clarke, and the losses will always hurt, I know that, I understand that, but you have to remember how many lives you saved.”  She pulled him into her arms and felt him collapse gratefully against her, his head resting on her chest, as she stroked his back and kissed his hair.  “You’re so brave,” she whispered.  “I wish you knew that.  I wish I could make you see what I see.”

“Nobody else,” he started to say, then stopped himself, but they both knew what he was trying to tell her.

_Nobody else has ever seen me the way you do._

“You’re not going back there alone,” she whispered.  “I’m going back with you.  I’ll be there.  I’ll always be there.  No matter what happens – however the others look at you, or whatever Jasper Jordan says, or however long it takes before things are right again with Octavia.  You’re not alone, Bellamy.  I promise.  I’m always going to be on your side.”

When he kissed her, there was something else in it besides just desire.  It felt, to Abby, like _gratitude._  He kissed her like the things she was saying had finally had begun, in some small way, to get through.    _I’m right here,_ she told him silently as his mouth opened against hers and his powerful arms wrapped around her to lower them both to the soft ground, where their bodies lay pillowed on the sweet-smelling grass beneath their blanket.  If there was a way to tell him with her touch, with her body, the things he didn’t seem quite able to let himself hear through words, then she would find it.

But he was telling her something too, with his trail of kisses along her collarbone and the hand that slipped down to run light fingertips through the aching wetness between her thighs while his other arm wrapped her in a tight embrace.  He needed her.  She was _needed._ Not for the things she did – for being the doctor, the chancellor, the one keeping the whole camp running – but for who she was.

And it was no small thing, besides – at an age that wasn’t quite twice his but was closer to it than not – to have a young Greek god in the prime of his life be so overcome by desire that he couldn’t keep his hands off her.

She could get used to this.

Which was precisely the problem.

“Bellamy,” she murmured up at him, lifting his head from where he was nuzzling into her neck, and cupping his jaw in her hands.  “If we do it a second time, it’s just going to make it harder when we get home and have to stop.”

“Maybe we don’t have to stop.”

“We do,” she said, reluctance in her voice.  “You know we do.”

“Why?”

“Because we have to work together.  Because I'm the Chancellor and you're my guard.  If someone found out – “

“They won’t.”

“Bellamy – “

He shushed her with a soft finger over her mouth.  “Do you want me to stop?” he asked.  “Right now.  In this moment.  Here.  Do you want me to stop?”

“But – “

“Don’t think about four hours from now,” he pleaded.  “Can we just live here for a minute?  Can we think about all of that later?”

Finally she nodded.  “Yes,” she said softly.  “We can think about that later.”

“And you don’t want me to stop?”

“Oh God,” she murmured, looking up at him, “no, honey.  No.  I don’t want you to stop.”

When he entered her, it was slow and gentle at first, almost tentative, as if he was afraid at any moment she would change her mind.  He was still skittish with her at unexpected moments, but her soft touch and murmured words soothed him into letting go.  “You feel so good inside me,” she whispered, and was rewarded by a dazzling, delighted smile, a little embarrassed and shy still but beaming with pride.  He pushed in a little deeper, and then a little deeper, dropping soft little kisses against her mouth and cheek and forehead as he went.  His low, grunting, hungry moans sent shivers down her spine, and so she told him that too.  “I like the sounds you make,” she murmured, her lips against his ear.  “I like the way you sound when you’re inside me.”

“Abby,” he groaned, his voice raw and raspy as he kissed her neck, and she could feel him swell harder and harder inside her, could feel her voice stirring him, rousing him.  Her hands slid down his sun-warmed skin, savoring the flex and release of muscle as his powerful back and taut, perfect ass rose and fell on top of her.  Everything about him was hard and smooth and strong and there was something about him that made her feel small and soft and delicate, but in a good way.  In a way that meant she could lie back and let go and set her burdens down for a minute and still feel safe. He couldn’t stop kissing her skin and touching her hair and staring down at her with eyes dazed with wonder, and as he drove deeper and deeper inside her, pressing her down into the soft grass, she felt herself begin to melt into him.  She’d been drawn to him, at first, out of some sudden, startling passion of generosity and tenderness, wanting to hold him, to give comfort, to make him feel good.  But it had taken her entirely by surprise, how good he made _her_ feel, too.

“I swear to God,” she breathed into the soft dark curls of his hair, as he pressed hot open-mouthed kisses against her throat, “I never saw this coming.”

Bellamy chuckled a little at this, and went still inside her to prop himself up on his elbows and look down into her face.  “I broke my leg once,” he said unexpectedly.  “When I was sixteen.  I was helping repair a light fixture and the ladder broke.  They brought me into Medical and you were the doctor on duty, and I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life.”

Abby laughed, and flushed a little with something that was both flattery and embarrassment.  “This isn’t the _best_ time,” she observed dryly, “to remind me that I was already practicing medicine by the time you were sixteen.”

He grinned at her, charmingly unembarrassed.  “Well, you could take it that way,” he pointed out, “or you could take it the other way.”

“Which is what?”

“That teenage Bellamy would be pretty damn jealous of adult Bellamy right now,” he said, grinning with an irresistibly cocky delight, and any response she might have made was swallowed up in a sharp, startled cry as his hips began to rise and fall again.

“Well, adult Bellamy is doing him proud,” she gasped, struggling for breath as he drove deeper and deeper into her.  “Just don’t stop.”

“Are you close?” he murmured, leaning down to brush her hair out of her face and kiss her mouth lightly.  She couldn’t speak, could only nod.  His hand slipped down the soft skin of her belly and hips to make its way back between her thighs, and she gasped as he found her clit again.  “Do you like it,” he asked, almost shyly, “when I touch you here?” and there was something so vulnerable in it that she felt herself begin to dissolve.

“I like everything,” she whispered, trembling with pleasure.  “I like all of it.  Everything you do.  Everywhere you touch me.  You make me feel so good.”  She wrapped her arms around his back, fingers digging into his flesh as she arched towards him, mouth pressed against his hard strong shoulder.  “Everything you do to me feels good,” she breathed into his skin.  “Just don’t stop.”

His fingertip glided fast, tight little circles around the hard bud of her clit, sending shivers through her body, as his cock plunged in and out, and she could feel from the sudden tension in his body that he was close too.  But he was holding back, he was trying to swallow it down to make sure she came first, and it struck her again, this unexpectedly generous side of him she’d never seen before.  She liked this Bellamy, whose walls were all down.  Who trusted her enough to permit her to see him vulnerable, to see him laugh and cry and come.  Who longed so badly for someone to hold him to keep the nightmares at bay but had too much pride to ask for it, choosing to suffer in stoic silence instead.

She wondered how long it had been since someone had reached out and touched that Bellamy.  Maybe nobody ever had.

But she wanted to.  She wanted to hold him in her arms and not let go.

His cock and his hand sent dueling shockwaves through her body that collided in an overwhelming orgasm, causing her whole body to arch upwards off the blanket towards him as her desperate wild moans echoed around the clearing.  “Oh God,” she whimpered.  “Oh, Bellamy.” He smiled down at her, watching her come, stroking her hair, feeling her tremble beneath him and then soften back down against the cushion of grass.  "Oh," she murmured again as her body began, finally, to ease and still.  "That was . . . incredible.  That was so good."  She reached up, overcome with affection, and pulled him down towards her, cradling him against her breast.  "You make me feel so good," she whispered.  "Let me make you feel good too."

But he didn't move.  She could feel, startlingly, his whole body growing tight and stiff, his hips slowing to a halt against hers, his cock still a bar of iron buried deep inside her.  His hands drifted off her body to clench into fists at his side.  “Bellamy,” she whispered reassuringly, stroking his hair, kissing his jaw, rubbing her hands comfortingly along his back.  “Honey, let go.  Let me make you come.”

But he shook his head, almost fiercely.  “Then it will be over,” he stunned her by saying, and her eyes met his in astonishment.

“Bellamy,” she said again, uncertainty threading her voice, but she wasn't sure how to answer him.

“Once we stop," he said in a heavy voice, "once we get dressed and pack up and go back to Arkadia, it's over.  This is all over."

She didn't argue, but took his face in her hands and guided him back to look at her.

"Was this a mistake?" she asked him gently.  "Should I not have -"

He shook his head.  "I didn't mean that," he said.  "Or, I only halfway meant that.  I just meant . . . " But he trailed off, his voice uncertain, and couldn't look at her anymore.

"Talk to me," she murmured, caressing his cheek.  "Please."

"I don't want to go back to being that other guy again," he said abruptly.

"What other guy?"

"The guy who killed innocent people," Bellamy said, almost snapping, as though he was suddenly angry (but not, she didn't think, at her).  "Kids.  People who trusted us.  People who helped us.   _That_ guy.  The guy everyone thinks is a murderer."

"Everyone doesn't think that, Bellamy."

“Maybe they should," he answered in a small voice, his eyes fixed on the ground, and the fog of sudden and crushing sadness hovering around him made a sharp little crack in her heart.

"Oh, Bellamy," she sighed.  "Sweetheart, don't do this to yourself."  But he still couldn't look at her, jaw clenched, eyes straining to hold back tears.

Abby slid her arms up to grasp his shoulders, then wrapped her thighs tightly around him to hold herself in place and shifted him over onto his back, settling her hips in place to straddle him, holding him inside her.  He gasped through gritted teeth  at the change in angle and didn't pull away, but he still wasn't there.  She still didn't have him back.  So she leaned forward, took his face in her hands and guided it back to face her. “I see you,” she whispered, her voice pulsing with affection and warmth.  “I’ll always see you.  Even if the others did look at you that way – and they don’t, Bellamy, you’re the only one who believes that – but even if they did, _I_ don’t.  I see you.  And I’m going to be there.”  She reached down and took his hand in hers, interlacing her fingers with his, and lifted it to her lips to press a soft kiss on his scarred knuckles.  He closed his eyes, his jaw clenched, but she kissed his hand over and over without ceasing.  She didn’t say it out loud – that she knew this was the hand that had pulled the lever inside the mountain with Clarke – but still, he understood.  “You saved my life with this hand,” she murmured, and that got him to open his eyes, to stare up at her, some dark emotion on his face.  So she bent down, hair a silken curtain trailing over his skin, and rocked her hips against him, sending him deeper and deeper.  “Please,” she murmured, kissing his cheek and jaw.  “Let go, Bellamy.  Let me in.  Let me make you feel as good as you made me feel.”

“Abby,” he began uncertainly, and she could see the words he didn’t say as clearly as if they were written in the air above his head – that maybe he didn’t _deserve_ to feel good after everything that had happened.  But when she leaned forward, bracing herself on his chest and began to ride him, gently at first and then picking up speed, he didn’t resist.  

"Please come inside me," she whispered again.  "Please, just let go."  And as his hands drifted to cup her ass, he slowly began to respond, his hips rising up towards hers, over and over, harder and harder, until there he was, he was back with her again, he was connected to her again, his eyes locked on hers and his lips parted to catch his breath as their bodies rose and fell together.  She came again when he did, sudden and unexpected; the frantic stutter of his hips against hers as his cock plunged inside her was too much to resist.  He closed his eyes as the wave hit him, and she leaned down to capture his mouth in her own before sinking down against him.

“We’re almost out of time,” he said in a hollow voice as he took her in his arms, cradling her small, soft body against him.   

“Then hold me for a little while longer," she said, pressing her mouth against his chest.  "Just stay with me, right here."

* * *

 

##  **Chapter Three**

**TWO MONTHS LATER**

She didn’t say anything for a long time.

She watched Bellamy drive, his hands white-knuckling the steering wheel, as the Rover's headlights swept ahead through the dark forest in front of them.  Kane had gone in the first Rover with the rest of the guards to get debriefed by Pike on the drive home, and Octavia had taken her horse and would likely beat them home by an hour.  “You should ride back with Bellamy,” Kane had said to Abby as they returned to the Polis boundary, and he hadn’t needed to elaborate further for her to know exactly what he meant.

Someone had to try and get through to him, and she was their best hope.

She could tell he expected her to talk the moment they climbed into their seats and watched the other Rover drive away, and he seemed relieved that she didn’t.  There was an almost imperceptible lessening of tension as he looked over at her and saw her staring straight ahead, not looking at him.  So he turned the key and started down the rough winding road back to Arkadia.

Abby didn’t like driving at night.  It wasn’t that she was afraid, exactly – Bellamy was a good, careful driver, and he seemed to sense that she didn’t quite trust the Rovers yet, so he was extra cautious when Abby was one of his passengers.  It was more to do with the way the headlights sliced through the darkness, carving out a path that then closed up ominously behind them as though it was never there, like the car was a tiny island of light adrift in a dark sea.  She could _sense_ the world out there beyond the walls of the Rover but she couldn't _see_ it, and the walls of silent black trees still unnerved her considerably.

On another night, she’d have suggested they stay over in Polis as planned, and drive back in the morning.

But she was the Chancellor of the Sky People, and Azgeda had just bombed Mount Weather off the face of the earth with dozens of their people inside, which meant she was urgently needed at home.

She ventured another glance at Bellamy, pale and grim in the driver’s seat, and took a deep breath, steeling herself for confrontation.  They’d decided – or rather, Abby had – that it wasn’t a good idea for them to be alone in the Rover together.  And then, after a routine physical became excruciating when Jackson left to go run an errand while she was pressing a stethoscope against Bellamy’s bare chest to listen to his (wildly, erratically pounding) heartbeat, she’d been forced to extend the ban to being alone _anywhere_ together.  She’d said no more, and she’d meant it, and they were struggling desperately to navigate their way out of desire into friendship, with mixed results.  It was no wonder that he’d turned to leaning more and more on Kane, with whom things were decidedly less complicated.  She’d been happy to see Bellamy begin to open up with him, and hoped maybe Marcus could be the safe space he needed.

And maybe he still could be, but not tonight.

Not after Bellamy had violated direct orders to take Pike and Octavia to Polis under Echo’s false pretenses, leaving Mount Weather without enough guards to stop an assassin.  Not after his friend Gina had died saving Raven and Sinclair, whom they had nearly lost as well.

Not with Mount Weather once again full of innocent dead, while Bellamy blamed himself for failing to stop it, and Clarke once again refusing to come home.

“If you’re looking for someone to blame,” she finally said, in a low voice, “you should start with me.”

He didn’t look at her.  “You can’t talk me out of this, Abby,” he said in an iron voice.  “You can’t make this better.”

“I’m the Chancellor,” she told him.  “The hospital was my idea.  The Farm Station settlement was my idea.  And the supply runs, too.  All those people were there because of me.  If it wasn’t for me, Mount Weather would have been empty.”

“Then Azgeda would have found someplace else to bomb,” said Bellamy dully, “and I would still have been the idiot who trusted Echo and got everyone killed.”

“You didn’t kill those people, Bellamy.”

“I may as well have.”

 _“Stop_ that,” she said fiercely, reaching out to touch his shoulder, and he flinched so violently that the car swerved.  He slammed on the brakes suddenly, switching off the engine and killing the headlights, and before she even knew what had happened he had jumped out of the car.

“Where are you going?” she called after him.

“I can’t do this with you right now,” he fired back, and vanished into the black night.

After a moment, she opened the door to the Rover and climbed carefully out, her eyes adjusting to the sudden shock of the headlights switching off and leaving her in total darkness.  She considered, for a moment, attempting to follow Bellamy, but decided against it.  He would come back for her when he was ready, and she doubted he'd leave her alone for long.  Not with the weight of all that darkness pressing in on her from all sides, in the heart of the forest, with the first Rover so far ahead of them that they'd lost sight of the taillights in the distance.  Not on the night she'd gotten her daughter back and then said goodbye to her again all at once.

Bellamy would never do that to her, she told herself over and over, and she was right.  She heard him before she saw him, about twenty minutes later, as the telltale crackle of dried leaves underfoot startled her into looking up and straining her eyes into the thick wall of trees as one lone shadow untangled itself from the darkness and moved towards her.  The thick wall of clouds covering the moon drifted slowly apart as she watched him approach, and the faint white light made his already pale, strained face appear almost ghostlike.

"Bellamy," she said, and held out her hand, but he didn't seem to hear her.

“I don’t want a lecture,” he said in a raw, knife-sharp voice, “and I don’t want you to tell me all about how this isn’t my fault.  I don’t want you to make me feel better.  I don’t want you to talk.”  And then suddenly he was on top of her, rough and hard and just on the edge of violent, backing her forcefully up against the side of the Rover.  

“Bellamy,” she began warningly, but he ignored her, seizing her hips in strong hands and pressing his body up against hers so tight that she could hardly breathe.  His legs straddled her thigh, his fingers dug into the soft flesh of her waist, and his mouth crashed into hers.  But it wasn’t like before, it wasn’t Bellamy kissing her, it was some unrecognizable twisted version of him built out of self-loathing and fury, and the desperate way he clung to her as though she might be able to save him shattered her heart into pieces.  “Bellamy, stop,” she whispered as his mouth descended roughly to her neck, his hands slid up her waist and underneath her shirt to shove her bra up and free her breasts to his insistent grasp.  He pressed his hips hard against her, writhing, grinding, trying to manifest some kind of sensation, but it wasn’t working.  She could feel his cock through his jeans, still soft, refusing to cooperate no matter how hard he tried.  “Bellamy, _stop,”_ she repeated forcefully, pushing him away from her but clutching his hands firmly, to keep him from bolting.  “Stop.  You don’t want this.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t,” she insisted.  “I would know if you did.  Your body is telling you it doesn’t want this.  Not here.  Not tonight, not like this.  Please, honey, just _stop._  Stop, and listen to me.”

“Abby, I swear to God, if you’re going to tell me not to blame myself – “

“You thought we were in danger,” she said gently, silencing him, and he looked away.  “Clarke, and Kane, and me.  You knew we were in Polis.  Someone you trusted told you we were in danger.  Bellamy, _any_ of us would have done what you did.”  He couldn’t look at her, and tugged a little to try and free his hands from hers, but she didn’t let go.  “You were trying to save us, Bellamy.  Echo lied to you.  She betrayed your trust.  You couldn’t have known.”

“Raven almost _died_ ,” he said, eyes welling with tears.

“But she didn’t.”

“But Gina did.”  Abby couldn’t argue with that.  “And all those Farm Station people.  And the food stores, Abby, and the supplies, we can’t support the whole camp without – “

“Bellamy,” she murmured, her voice soothing, her fingers caressing his knuckles as she held tightly to his hands.  “We’ll figure it out.  We’ll find a way.  We always find a way.  We’re going to get through this.  You’re going to get through this.  You have before.  You always want to believe that everything that goes wrong is your fault, but – “

“Oh my God,” he exploded, “will you just _stop talking_?”

Abby raised an eyebrow.  “Don’t snap at me,” she said mildly, and her refusal to fight back just angered him more.  “We’re all grieving, Bellamy, we’re all frightened, and you’re not the only one who wishes that Clarke had agreed to come home instead of staying in Polis inside the lion’s den with people I’m not sure we can trust.”

“Will you just _stop_ ?” he growled again, moving closer to her.  “Stop being so fucking _reasonable_ .  Stop being kind.  Stop trying to understand me.  Stop trying to _fix_ this, Abby.  Can’t we please just stop talking for a minute and not think?  Don’t you want to _not think_?”

His hands dropped to her waist again, moving in close, but she shook her head.  “This isn’t what we do, Bellamy,” she said firmly.  “You and me.  This isn’t what we do.  We _talk_ to each other.  That’s what we do. I’m here, Bellamy, I’m right here.   _Please._ Please, just talk to me.”

“Abby – “

“How do you think you’d feel in the morning?” she asked reasonably.  “If I just unzipped and bent over right here and let you fuck me up against the Rover until you came so hard that for a minute or two you could forget about Mount Weather?  You think you’d feel good about that tomorrow?  No.  Mount Weather would still be there, and you’d hate yourself.  You’d hate yourself so much you’d start to hate me.  And I couldn’t bear that,” she said gently, her voice softening, lifting her hand to caress his cheek.  He closed his eyes, tears glittering on his eyelashes.  She could see the moonlight reflecting off them, like his face was scattered with fallen stars.  “I could never do that to us,” she whispered.  “It _meant_ something to me, that night.  I could never poison that by being with you again like this.  You want to disappear from yourself, but I can’t be with you if you’re not _here._ ”  She felt her own eyes begin to well up as she brushed the now freely-flowing tears from his cheeks.  “You’re angry, and guilty, and grieving,” she said tenderly.  “And those are real things that are happening to you.  You can’t deflect them.  You can’t fuck them away.  That’s not how this works.  You want to magically erase these memories, erase this day.  You want to _forget_ .  You don’t want _me_.”

“I _always_ want you,” he said in a low voice, suddenly looking up and meeting her eyes, and this time when he moved closer to her it was different, it was softer, it was _real,_ because he was looking at her and his hands moved up to tangle in her hair and oh this was such a bad idea but she’d spent two months of cold lonely nights remembering the way he had felt inside her and she suddenly lost the will to push him away. “I always want you,” he said again, and this time when he kissed her, his body pressing hers against the Rover, everything was different.  This time when his strong thighs slipped in on either side of hers and his body began, slowly and gently, to grind against hers, she could feel him instantly begin to swell against her and felt an answering wetness between her own thighs in response. This time when his hands slid up the rounded planes of her belly beneath her shirt to reach her breasts, his touch was soft and the caress of his thumbs against her nipples made her gasp.  This time her mouth fell open beneath his and his tongue stroked insistently, hungrily against hers and she felt herself begin to melt and grow weak with longing.  She had tried so hard to stop wanting him, but her whole body felt electric in his presence.    _Yes, yes, yes,_ cried every nerve and muscle and bone in her body, pleading for relief, whispering how easy it would be, how close they were, just a pair of zippers and a few inches of distance and then she could have everything she wanted.    _Yes, yes, yes,_ cried her heart, remembering the dizzying sensation of wrapping Bellamy in her arms and looking up at him as he rose and fell inside her, as his wide awestruck eyes gazed down into hers with impossible affection.

_Yes, yes, yes._

“No,” she said, and placed her hands on his chest to push him gently, but firmly, away.

He stared at her for a long moment, eyes dark with emotion, before turning his back and climbing into the driver’s seat of the Rover.  She followed, climbing in beside him, and closed her eyes against the searing brightness as he switched the headlights on again.

“Bellamy,” she began tentatively, but he shook his head.

“Don’t,” he said roughly.  “Just don’t.”

They drove in silence the rest of the way back to Arkadia, silent tears streaking down both their cheeks.

When they finally pulled into the hangar and Bellamy switched off the engine, they sat in silence for a moment.

“That night in the Rover,” Abby said, staring ahead, not looking at him.  “The night that we – “

“I know what night you’re talking about.”

“There hadn’t been anyone else since,” she began, then faltered.  “You were the first since – “

“Since Jake,” he finished for her, and he stared straight ahead too.  “You hadn’t been with anyone else since your husband died.”

“It _meant_ something to me,” she said softly.  “You _mean_ something to me, Bellamy.  And I think, maybe, at least for that night, I meant something to you.”  He didn’t answer.  “I don’t think you should be alone tonight,” she said, a little tentatively, and he didn’t respond or even look at her but she could see his hands tighten on the steering wheel so she knew he knew what she meant.  “Come to my room,” she whispered.  “Come stay the night with me.”

“I thought you said you didn’t want me,” he muttered gruffly, still not able to look at her.

“I _always_ want you,” she said, and it startled him enough that he almost turned to look at her before recollecting himself and turning back away again.  “But I want you the right way.  The way it was before.”

“You want to hold me and kiss me and tell me I’m not a monster,” he said dully, “so that maybe for a few minutes you can convince me to believe you.”

“Bellamy – “

“That Bellamy is dead,” he said, and climbed out of the Rover, slamming the door behind him and vanishing into the dark before she could speak.

She waited all night, clinging desperately to hope.  Wanting to believe she could make him understand, wanting to believe it wasn't too late.

But he never came.

He avoided her for three days.  When she finally saw him again, he was sitting at the bar in the hangar, several drinks in and deep in conversation with Charles Pike.

She watched them, unseen, for a long time, and felt a cold prickle of foreboding shiver down her spine.

 _It's not too late,_ she whispered silently to him, but when he looked up for a moment and met her eyes, then looked back down again, she felt as though she'd just been slapped in the face. He had looked _through_ her.  As though he didn't even recognize her at all.

 _"That Bellamy is dead,"_ he had told her, and she swallowed back the sting of tears, desperate to convince herself it wasn't true.

* * *

**ONE WEEK LATER**

 She’d lost all track of time.

She had returned from the hangar to her quarters as quickly as she could, closing the door behind her, where she sank down to the floor with her back against the wall and burst into tears. She drew her knees up to her chin and buried her head in her arms and sobbed and sobbed without ceasing.

Afternoon faded into evening outside the small high window in the wall of her quarters, but Abby didn’t see or care.  She didn’t even notice when, hours later, Marcus came to find her, slowly lowering himself to sit on the floor beside her.  She didn’t see him there until he had pulled her into his arms, cradling her close to his chest.

“It wasn’t about you,” he said gently.  “He didn’t do it to hurt you.  He’s just . . . lost.”  She buried her head in his shoulder and felt the seemingly unending well of tears inside her continue to pour forth as Marcus rubbed her back with comforting hands.  “He hasn’t been himself since Clarke left,” he said.  “You know it, I know it, everybody knows it.  I think seeing her in Polis like that only made everything worse.”

“I tried to – “

“I know you did,” he said.  “You’ve done everything you could.”

“He’s going to hate himself,” she said, voice shaky.  “He’s going to do something awful and he’s going to hate himself and I won’t be able to stop it because he can’t even _look_ at me.”

“We’ll get through to him,” he murmured, stroking her hair.  “We will.   _You_ will.”

“You don’t know that,” she sniffled miserably into his sweater.

“You got through to _me_ ,” he said gently, and she looked up, eyes streaked with tears.  Marcus gave her the ghost of a sad little smile, brushed the tears off her cheeks, and stood up.  “I’ll do it,” he said.

“No, I can – you shouldn’t have to – “

“I’ll do it,” he repeated.  “Stay here.  I won’t be gone long.”

“We can’t lose him, Marcus,” she said, and he placed a comforting hand on her shoulder as he turned to go.

“We won’t,” he promised her.  “We’ll get through.  You and me.  I promise.”

Then he closed the door behind him and made his way down the hall, with a heavy heart, to hand over the Chancellor pin to Charles Pike.

 

* * *

 

##  **Chapter Four**

This is what Abby remembers.

* * * * *

_All she wants is for Clarke to join her in the City of Light._

_ALIE has promised that no one will harm her.  “She is the only one who knows how to operate the second version of my program,” she tells Abby.  “We need her.  We require her knowledge.  Once she has taken the key, Phase III will proceed as planned.”_

_Abby would like to go to her.  She would like to hold her daughter and kiss her yellow hair and whisper into her ear that everything will be all right, that all she needs to do is take the key and they can be together again.  They can be happy.  Clarke carries too much sorrow, and Abby’s love is fierce and strong, and all she wants is to see her baby girl smile again._

_But ALIE and Thelonious will not permit it._

_“We expected you to have better success with Kane,” says Thelonious, with something like displeasure in his voice.  “If you were unable to persuade him, you won’t be able to get through to her.”_

_“Clarke saw you at Arkadia,” ALIE reminds Abby.  “She knows you have taken the key.  She will be disinclined to trust you.”_

_So instead she watches from the tower._

_They walk in through the Polis gates, the Grounder King holding a knife to her daughter’s throat.  Clarke will be delivered to the throne room, to ALIE and Ontari and Thelonious, and after they have obtained the second version of the program and given her the key, Abby will be permitted to see her.  Not before._

_She stands at the window and looks down at the crowd gathered below, at Clarke’s golden hair shining in the chilly winter sun, and she smiles._ Soon, baby girl, _she tells her._ We’ll be together soon.

_Then, just for a moment, everything stops._

_There is a cluster of shapes moving through the crowd.  They too are dressed like Grounders, like Clarke, but they don’t wear it well.  Even if every Grounder in Polis was not living in the City of Light with her, Abby would know that these weren’t Grounders._

_“She brought them all with her,” says Abby.  The last Arkadians.  The last of her people who have not yet taken the key.  They are so close.  Phase II is almost complete.  They just need Clarke and these last seven –_

_Abby stops._

_There are seven of them, but she only recognizes six._

_ALIE tilts her head, puzzled, and regards Abby thoughtfully.  “Come away from the window, Abby,” says Thelonious abruptly._

_“Who is that one?” Abby asks, pointing down from the window.  “Who is he?  I don’t remember him.”_

_“Come away, Abby,” says Thelonious again, but she doesn’t.  She’s trying to remember._

_She knows there are memories that ALIE has locked away.  She lives inside the City of Light, in a beautiful white-and-blue-and-glass apartment at the top of a tower that looks out over the sea, and every morning she wakes up in bed next to Marcus and everything is peaceful and simple.  Jackson is here, and David Miller, and Kyle Wick, and she’s taken a liking to a Grounder girl named Emori, too – the one who helped them with John Murphy.  They go for walks and throw dinner parties and read books.  Every day is sunny and every night is clear and full of stars.  And the only thing that ALIE asks in return is that Abby not open the locked door._

_She tried, the first day she arrived.  Later, Marcus tried too.  But ALIE stopped them in time.  “These are your painful memories,” she told them both.  “You have come here to be protected from them.  I keep them locked up for your own safety.”_

_Abby knows that Clarke’s father was named Jake and he gave her the ring around her neck. She knows he’s gone, though the details are fuzzy.  She remembers lots of joyful moments.  She remembers being happy with him.  She remembers life on the Ark.  She knows there are things she doesn’t remember, things about Jake, but they’re not important, and anyway it’s safer with them on the other side of the door._

_But the young man with dark hair who isn’t a Grounder doesn’t live anywhere on this side of the door.  She doesn’t remember him at all._

_“What’s his name?” she asks again, and even though she trusts that ALIE is taking care of her, protecting her, even though she has absolute faith that ALIE’s choices are the right ones  . . . still, she wonders.  “Why can’t I remember him?”_

_“Because your memories of him caused you pain,” explains ALIE, as though it is the most obvious thing in the world._

_“All of them?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“Come away from the window,” says Thelonious, more insistently this time, and this time they don’t give her a choice, her body does what ALIE orders._

_“Tell me his name.”_

_“That information is not relevant at this time,” says ALIE reassuringly, but for some reason Abby can’t let it go.  She dimly remembers, when she first arrived, before she realized how happy she could be here, that she resisted many times.  She has long since ceased resisting.  But suddenly she feels a small, sharp crack in the blissful dome of silence that wraps around her mind and shields it from all troubling things.  On the other side of the locked door, she hears something begin to shift and move and come to life, as though a memory is trying to get out._

_“Bellamy,” she suddenly says, and ALIE’s head snaps up sharply, her lovely expressionless face tilted to the side, the way it does when she receives new information.  “Bellamy,” she says again.  “His name is Bellamy Blake.”_

_She doesn’t remember anything after that._

* * *

 

This is what Marcus remembers.

* * * * *

_He’s making dinner when Abby returns._

_The kitchen in their apartment looks out over the water through a wall made entirely of glass.  ALIE told him when he arrived that she could give him and Abby anything they wanted, so everything is sunny and open, one big airy space with high ceilings and white walls and windows everywhere to let in the light.  Marcus doesn’t remember very much about the world he lived in before, but ALIE knew he would not want anything that felt cramped or dark or crowded, which must mean the place he used to live was like that.  He doesn’t remember much about anything from before; his locked room is much bigger than Abby’s, so he relies on her memories when his own are cloudy.  But she’s here, so he’s happy.  He doesn’t need very much to be happy.  ALIE has offered him anything he could ever want – if he pulls a book off the living room shelf, she asks if he would like a library down the street; if she sees him stop on a walk to look at a patch of flowers, she builds a park – but he always smiles and shakes his head.  He has Abby, and he feels no pain or sorrow.  That’s enough.  That’s all he needs.  It’s Abby who gets restless._

_Thelonious relies on Abby back in the other world – the one Marcus doesn’t like, the one he prefers not to return to – so she comes and goes, while he stays in the City of Light.  When she returns this time, he’s just putting the finishing touches on a perfectly roasted chicken (ALIE has taught him to cook) and is placing a pair of white china ramekins in the gleaming chrome refrigerator so the chocolate mousse can set while they eat._

_“Time to go,” she says, “ALIE needs us.”_

_"Us?" he asks, raising an eyebrow, and she nods.  This is new.  Since the day he took the key to the City of Light, Marcus Kane has not gone back.  Thelonious has not sent for him once._

_Something has changed._

_He just has time to turn off the stove before they both vanish into thin air and reappear outside The Citadel, where ALIE and Thelonious are waiting._

_“We have a mission for you,” says Thelonious. “There is an impending manual firewall breach in Arkadia.”_

_“We secured Arkadia,” says Abby, but he shakes his head._

_“Someone is on their way back."_

_“Raven Reyes has found a way to rewrite my code,” ALIE says.  “They are barricaded inside the temple, but one of the group escaped.  My code has been removed from the Ark mainframe, but Arkadia’s communication system could be manually re-networked to the Ark.  If someone in Arkadia manually accesses the comm system using the administrative password and shuts down the firewall, Raven can connect the second version of my program to the shuttle and send someone into the City of Light to breach the Citadel.  You need to get back to Arkadia and stop him.”_

_“Him?” asks Marcus, and Thelonious nods._

_“We believe she has sent Bellamy Blake,” he says – a name which means nothing to Marcus – and hands Abby a key._

_“We need him,” says ALIE, in her cool, clear voice.  “He will be able to provide vital information on Raven and Clarke’s plans.  Get him to take the key.”_

_“If he won’t?”_

_“We can’t afford a security breach,” says Thelonious.  “If he won’t take the key, you’ll have to kill him.”_

_Marcus does not know the name Bellamy Blake.  But something happens to him when Thelonious says those words.  He feels nothing, but it isn't the usual nothing.  It isn't a cool white blankness, it's a void.  It's a nothingness where_ something _used to be._

_He looks at Abby._

_Abby looks back at him.  She feels it too._

_ALIE cocks her head quizzically, watching them both, and this is what sends the first flicker of worry through his mind.  If Bellamy Blake was unimportant, ALIE would not be watching him so carefully to see if he reacted to the name._

_“Get to the Rover,” says Thelonious abruptly.  “He took the other one and has a head start.  You’ll have to drive fast.”_

_* * * * *_

_“Who is Bellamy Blake?” he says to Abby as the Rover roars through the fields towards Arkadia, but she shakes her head._

_“I don’t know.”_

_“Why don’t we remember him?”_

_“Something happened,” says Abby.  “It was painful.”_

_“And we wanted to forget?” he says, brow furrowed, puzzling it through.  “Is that why we took the key?”_

_“It must have been,” she says reassuringly, though that doesn’t feel quite right to either of them._

_“I don’t want to kill him,” says Marcus.  “I don’t know anything else about him, but I know that. I  can’t kill him.”_

_“Don’t worry,” smiles Abby, patting his knee comfortingly.  “ALIE will tell us exactly what to do.”_

* * *

 

This is what Bellamy remembers.

* * * * *

_Raven’s no dummy._

_“If you drain the fuel tank all the way,” she points out reasonably, “they’ll just go take one of the cargo trucks.  You gotta drain like a third of it out, enough so it looks full, and then make a tiny little puncture so it drains out as they drive.  With any luck it’ll run out at least a mile or two from Arkadia.  Buy you some time.”_

_“How do you know ALIE’s going to send someone in the Rover?” asks Harper.  “They could take horses, or pile a whole army in the transport vehicles.”  Raven doesn’t look up from the computer screen._

_“Because it’s what I would do,” she says absently, fingers whirring over the keyboard.  “They still don’t know what our plan is, and they don’t know where we are.  They know I’m close enough that I can hack into the shuttle wirelessly, but that’s all.  They’re preparing for war, and they want their army here.  No, they’re gonna send two, maybe three people back to Arkadia, and they’re probably gonna send people we know.  They’re not gonna want to kill you, Bell, they’ll want to chip you.  ALIE wants to know what I know.”_

_Bellamy nods, but Octavia still isn’t reassured._

_“Let me go with you,” she tells Bellamy.  “You need backup.  Raven, tell him he needs backup.”_

_“You are a warrior,” says Indra, cutting in before Bellamy can answer.  “This is the battleground, Octavia.  This is your place.”_

_Octavia looks like she might protest, but closes her mouth and drops down to the floor beside Jasper, trying to swallow back a scowl._

_It was Indra who found them this place.  There’s a secret passage that leads into, and out of, the temple where Becca’s shuttle is housed; and while the temple is crawling with ALIE’s soldiers, they have not found the passage yet, nor the old concrete bunker halfway between the temple and the outside walls where they have made their temporary hideout.  It’s cramped for this many people – the seven of them, plus Murphy and Indra, as well as Pike and Roan (who have made their stealthy way into the tower to find and retrieve Clarke) – but it’s soundproofed and hidden and it’s close enough to the temple for Raven to be able to access the remote data transfer between the shuttle and the Ark.  She can’t do anything with it yet, not until Bellamy reconnects the Ark to Arkadia, but she’s ready when he is._

_She clicks a few more times, then finally looked up at him.  “I’m sending you because there’s probably gonna be fighting,” she said.  “And I need Monty here.  But – “_

_“I can handle it, Raven,” he says for the hundredth time.  “You told me exactly what to do.”_

_“You can’t fuck it up.”_

_“I won’t.”_

_She hands him the long-distance walkie talkie and her hastily scribbled instructions.  He makes his goodbyes, gets a fierce hug from a still-anxious Octavia, then disappears out the passageway to the city limits._

_The Rover that Jaha’s army brought here when they abandoned Arkadia is parked on a flat stretch of road nearby.  It’s doors are unlocked and the key is in the ignition, because in a town full of zombies, who would steal it?  Bellamy drains the fuel tank to Raven’s specifications, makes a tiny incision, and watches as the dark liquid begins to trickle out drop by drop. It’s not enough, now, to raise any suspicion, but it’s a drive of several hours to Arkadia and with the fuel tank leaking the whole time, Raven’s plan should work.  With any luck, whoever they send after him won’t even make it to the gates before Raven shuts down the connection between their minds and the A.I.  With any luck, this will be over in three hours._

_But Bellamy Blake has never had that kind of luck._

_And he knows, before he even hears the Rover, who is going to be in it._

_The last time he saw Abby Griffin, she was standing in a hallway while Octavia and Lincoln stood guard, ushering everyone out the secret exit so they could make their way to the cave.  He watched Kane kiss her, hard and fierce, before disappearing through the wall, and the emotion inside his chest was made up of so many things at once that he could not name any of them._

_She did not kiss him – not with his sister twenty feet away – though something in her eyes seemed to indicate that maybe she wanted to.  But she had pulled him close in her arms and run her fingertips lightly up the back of his neck to slide through his hair and the fact that she could even bear his touch, after all the things he had done, overwhelmed him with such forceful emotion that he pulled away stiffly and abruptly to follow Kane without saying goodbye._

_She had always been kinder to him than he deserved._

_He hopes that Abby is still in there, somewhere.  If this all goes south, if she’s been sent there to kill him, he hopes at least she makes it quick._

* * * * *

_Raven’s instructions are clear to the point of patronizing (“If screen is black, turn on computer first”) and he feels more than a little proud of himself for how well he’s doing.  But she’s got this new super-genius brain now, which means even though it’s a lot of typing, it’s just following the steps she wrote down.  Click this.  Then type this.  Then this will happen.  Then type this.  He’s not as fast on the keyboard as he’d like, he has to go slow to get every letter and number right._

_Maybe it’s that, it’s the slow typing that erodes his head start.  Maybe he didn’t make as big a dent in the fuel tank as he thought he had.  Maybe she drove sixty miles an hour.  (Abby never learned how to drive, but ALIE can, which means Abby can now too.)  But regardless, he’s still one page of code away from done when he hears the Rover in the distance, coming over the hill._

_Everything in him wants to speed up, to race through this, to get out.  But if he types too fast he’ll make a mistake.  He’s not Raven.  He can’t improvise.  He has to hit every single key one at a time and check it against her notes.  He can’t screw this up.  He’s only got one shot._

_His luck holds, a little; he hears the Rover sputter and die (finally) from what sounds like a few hundred meters from the Arkadia gates.  It’s still faint.  She’ll have to come on foot.  Slower, which is good, but also she’ll be silent.  He won’t know which direction she’s coming from, the way he would if he could listen for the car._

_“How close are you?” comes Raven’s voice from the walkie-talkie.  “We’re ready over here when you are.”_

_“Dozen or so more lines to enter,” he tells her.  “But she’s here.”_

_“Who?”_

_“The Rover’s here,” he corrects himself.  “Whoever they sent.”_

_There’s a pause._

_“It might be someone else,” says Raven, a little doubtfully._

_“It might be,” he says, eyes glued to the keyboard, “but it won’t.”_

_Raven doesn’t say anything for a long time.  “I hope it won’t come to this,” she finally says, “and that we’ve cut her free before she reaches you.  But just in case – “_

_She falls silent again, and he grits his teeth, forcing himself not to get distracted.  Not with this much at stake.  He types in several more lines of code before she speaks again._

_“It’s not gone,” she says, surprising him, and he freezes just for a moment.  “The memories.  They’re all still there.  It’s just that, if they’re painful, ALIE sort of . . . puts a wall between them and you.  So you don’t quite think that they’re real.”_

_“You forgot Finn and Gina,” he says._

_“Yeah,” she says.  “But Jasper didn’t.  Jasper reminded me that they were real.  That was when it started to crumble.  Not all the way, but just enough.  If you need to buy yourself some time, keep her talking.  See if you can get her to remember you.”_

_“You forgot about Finn and Gina,” says Bellamy, “because what happened at the end was so painful that it erased all the happiness from everything that came before.  Right?  They disappeared because there was nothing left for you to remember about them that didn’t hurt.”_

_Raven didn’t say anything again for a long time.  He was three lines from the end before she spoke again._

_“She’ll remember you,” she tells him, but he shakes her head._

_“No,” he says dully.  “She won’t.”_

_He’s on the last line of code when he hears the footsteps._

Almost there, _he tells himself reassuringly – with more confidence than he feels – as he listens to the sound of boots on metal making their way to Raven’s lab.  He’s locked the door, of course, but ALIE knows how to shoot out a lock._

_Thirty more characters to enter._

_Then twenty._

_The first gunshot pings against the metal of the door, and he hears the knob rattle._

_Ten more._

_Another gunshot._

_Five more._

_Four._

_Three._

_Two._

_The door opens._

_“Please don’t touch that keyboard, Bellamy,” says the warm, pleasant voice of Marcus Kane.  “I don’t want to have to shoot you.”_

 

* * *

 

##  **Chapter Five**

_Forward slash. Return._

_Forward slash. Return._

_Forward slash. Return._

That was all he had left.  He was so close.  Just two clicks and he would have been done, it would have been over, Kane would have been Kane again.  He wouldn’t be standing in Raven’s doorway with a rifle on his shoulder and his finger on the trigger, ready to fire if Bellamy moved.

“You look like you,” he said, keeping his voice level, almost casual, wanting – for some stubborn, petty reason – to show ALIE that he wasn’t afraid.

“What did you expect?” Kane asked, raising an eyebrow, a half-smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, and it was _his_ smile, it was Marcus Kane’s real smile, and Bellamy knew that expression so well that he felt himself soften just the tiniest bit, letting his guard down just the tiniest, faintest bit, which was his first real mistake.  Kane moved a little further into the room, gun still drawn, but smiling, and Bellamy’s eyes followed him, which is how he ended up, without realizing until it was too late, unconsciously shifting his body to keep Kane in his line of sight, which meant he was no longer looking at the door.

She was quick, and he felt her before he saw her.  He could always sense when Abby Griffin was in the room.  By the time he turned around, she had stepped between him and the computer.

She wasn’t holding a gun, but she didn’t need one.  Bellamy knew instinctively how ALIE would use her.  Kane would threaten to shoot Bellamy, and if that didn’t work, he’d threaten Abby instead.

And Bellamy would have to let him, because if he did not click _forward slash, return_ before ALIE’s army found Raven and the others and shut the link down, everyone he loved would die.

“I don’t think we need that,” she said pleasantly to Kane.  “Why don’t we just talk for a minute.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to you, ALIE,” he said roughly, and from the way Abby’s eyes flicked up and to the left just for a minute, he knew ALIE was in the room with them, whispering instructions into both their ears, telling them what to do.

“Bellamy,” she said, her voice low and gentle, and he wasn’t stupid, he knew she was executing instructions ALIE was providing her, he knew that he was going to die here today and the only question was if it happened after _forward slash, return_ or before, and he knew that ALIE sent these two for a reason, because if she had access to Abby’s memories then she knew Bellamy would never want to hurt her.

But still.

He’d missed that voice.

“Listen to me,” she went on, and God help him, he did, turning slowly around (hands raised, to keep Kane from firing) so he could see her face.  It was bruised, her hair loose and tangled like he remembered she used to wear it, the way it was the very first time he saw her on the ground.  He wanted to run his fingers through it.  He wanted to kiss the bruise on her cheekbone.  He wanted to kill whoever had done that to her.  He wanted to run his thumb along her soft, silken lower lip until her mouth parted and then press his own against it until they both lost their breath.

But he had seen this once already.  He had watched what ALIE did to Raven.  Raven, who loved them all so much, who they would all have crawled through hell on their hands and knees to protect.  Raven, who had risked her life for all of them so many times.  Raven, who he had cradled in his arms as they watched Clarke step away from Finn’s lifeless body, staring in horror at the blood on her hands.

But still, the things she had said to them.  The things she had done.  The real Raven inside hadn’t been strong enough to stop it.

And it wasn’t Raven whose heart he had broken so badly that she had lost all her memories of him.

Because he knew, all the way down to his bones, as he looked down at Abby Griffin’s lovely, smiling face, that she had absolutely no idea who he was.

* * * * *

_“I’m the reason,” Raven says to Bellamy, sitting down next to him as he stares wordlessly into the fire while the others slept.  “Abby tried to save me.”_

_He doesn’t answer.  He’s still thinking about Clarke’s words, about the impossible, unbelievable notion of an Abby Griffin who would stand by and let ALIE’s army shoot at her daughter._

_He’s still thinking about how he could hardly bear to even give her a real goodbye, about how he’d wanted to kiss her and didn’t, about how different things might have been for all of them if he had stayed in Arkadia too._

_Raven peels back the bandages on her arms so he can see the long, clean line of a scalpel wound up each forearm.  “I was bleeding out,” she says.  “That’s why she took the chip.  Otherwise ALIE would have let me die.  She didn’t want the chip, Bellamy.  Maybe that means inside, somewhere, she can still fight.”_

_“Maybe,” he says flatly._

_“Clarke saved me,” Raven says firmly.  “She’ll find a way to save her mom.”_

_And she doesn’t mean it to wound him, but it does._

I’m a monster, _he thinks to himself, staring into the flames and fighting back tears.  Clarke is his best friend and this is her mother and yet he’s only grieving for himself.  Abby Griffin isn’t his and she never will be.  Abby Griffin doesn’t belong to him.  She belongs to Clarke, Raven should be comforting Clarke, Bellamy has no right to ask for comfort, no right to worry about her like this, and yet he can’t push Raven away because Raven shared all of Abby’s memories which makes her the only person in the whole world who knows._

_“We’ll get her back,” says Raven, but Bellamy doesn’t look up._

_Because he knows the truth: that maybe, if they’re very lucky, Clarke will get Abby back._

_Bellamy never will._

* * * * *

“It’s just us,” said Abby gently, her voice low and sweet and not frightening at all.  “There’s no army coming, Bellamy.  Either yours, or ours.  We’re all on our own here.  So we can just talk.  Okay?  No guns,” she said, nodding to Kane, who lowered his rifle just enough that Bellamy could breathe again.  “Let’s just talk.”

“I’ve seen this before, ALIE,” said Bellamy grimly, “I saw what you did to Raven.  I’m not scared of you.”

“It’s not ALIE,” Abby countered, regarding him with wide, pleading, innocent eyes.  “It’s me.  Bellamy, it’s me.  It’s Abby.”  She reached up and stroked his cheek with soft, gentle fingers, and it took every ounce of restraint in his body not to close his eyes and lose himself in it.

It had been so long since she touched him.

“I’m still Abby,” she whispered, “I’m still _your_ Abby,” and her sweet smile went straight to his heart, and he couldn’t help himself then, she was a magnetic force pulling him close, and before he knew it she was in his arms.

“Bellamy,” she sighed as she pulled him close, resting her face against his chest, burrowing close.  “I missed you so much.”  And he knew it wasn’t real, he knew it was an illusion, but it felt so good to pretend like it was true.  “I don’t like being apart from you,” she whispered, her hands sliding around his waist.  “We want you with us.  We miss you.  Please.”

“I’m not taking the key, Abby,” he said, but she didn’t answer.  Her hands slipped under the hem of his t-shirt and suddenly her palms were pressed flat against his back, warm and insistent, skin against skin, and the last time she had touched him there she’d been smiling up at him from a blanket on the grass as he made her come, and even though he knew that was exactly what ALIE wanted him to be thinking about he still couldn’t stop himself.

“It could be like before,” she whispered, her mouth trailing kisses up his neck.  “Everything feels good in the City of Light, Bellamy.  Let me take your pain away.  Please.  I just want you to be happy.”  She nibbled at his neck, her breath warm against his ear, and he hated himself for how swiftly he roused to her, because it wasn’t at all like being kissed by ALIE, it didn’t feel like a tactic, like a strategy, it felt like that night in the Rover, which was the worst violation of all, because he wasn’t sure how long he could actually resist.

She stepped back, then, and in one swift movement she pulled her sweater over her head.

“Abby,” he said uncertainly, looking from her to Kane, whose face was expressionless.  He watched her hands drop down to the waistband of her jeans to softly unfasten the buttons.  “Don’t,” he told her with more assurance than he felt.  “It won’t work.”

“I want you,” she whispered.  “I’m right here.  I’m so close.”  She pulled her jeans down just far enough to reveal the jut of hipbones beneath threadbare black cotton.  “Kiss me,” she said.  “Kiss me, and you can have me.  Right here.  Right now.”

Then she took a key out of her pocket, set it on her tongue, and smiled, beckoning him to her.

Inviting him to kiss it out of her mouth.

He had never wanted anything more in his life.

_Forward slash.  Return._

_Forward slash.  Return._

Everyone was counting on him.

“How did your husband die, Abby?” he asked her, and he felt her stiffen inside his arms, pulling away so she could look up at him.

“Bellamy, I promise you,” she said.  “I’m still me.”

“How did he die?”

Her eyes flicked somewhere over his shoulder – ALIE was feeding her answers.  “He was arrested and executed on the Ark,” she recited, the words seemingly without meaning.

“Arrested by Marcus Kane,” said Bellamy, hating himself for it, but out of other ideas, and it worked.

Abby’s brow furrowed in puzzlement, looking from ALIE to Kane and then back again.  Kane looked confused too.

“No,” said Abby uncertainly.  “He loves me.  I love him.”

“Yes,” said Bellamy.  “He does.  You do.  That doesn’t change what he did.”

“His name was Jake,” said Abby, fingering the ring around her neck.  “I remember that his name was Jake.”

“Jake was my friend,” said Kane, but in the same flat tone Abby had used before, as though ALIE were feeding him lines of dialogue.

“And you arrested him for treason,” said Bellamy.  “And then Thelonious floated him out the airlock.”

“Thelonious did?” Abby asked in genuine astonishment, turning around to stare wildly at Kane, and it was enough, it was the opening he needed, because her back was to the keyboard and he wouldn’t get another chance.

_Forward slash.  Return._

The screen lit up, lines of code scrolling past his eyes impossibly fast.  “Bellamy, no!” screamed Abby, but it was too late.  Raven was inside the Citadel.

“I’m sorry,” he said simply, and raised his hands in surrender as Kane pulled the trigger.

* * *

 

##  **Chapter Six**

_It's over._

_He’s patched Raven into the network so she can get Clarke into the Citadel.  He hit the last two keys.  He did the job she sent him home to do.  And there’s a part of him that isn’t sorry he’s about to die at Kane and Abby’s hands.  Justice, maybe, for the things he’s done to them.  For siding with Pike and voting against Abby for Chancellor.  For getting Kane arrested and almost killed.  For trying to right a wrong by turning Pike over to the Grounders, leaving Abby behind unprotected to be brainwashed by Jaha.  He failed to save Abby from the City of Light, and then they used her to get to Kane.  Everything they’ve done while under ALIE’s influence is_ his _doing.  On_ his _conscience.  He didn’t know – none of them could possibly have known – but he feels it, anyway._

Just kill me, _he thinks to Kane wearily, and as the muzzle of the rifle lifts up to his heart, he doesn’t even flinch.  Marcus Kane is the cleanest shot in Arkadia.  At least it will be quick._

Goodbye, _he calls silently to Abby, and closes his eyes to let it happen._

_Then several things happen at once._

_First, a shrill, high-pitched electronic wail, like a speaker shorting out, shrieks through the radio that he hasn’t switched off.  It’s not coming from his end, it’s coming from Raven’s._

_Second, Kane pulls the trigger on his rifle._

_Third, Kane gasps and winces and doubles over, as though at the mercy of a violent pain somewhere in the base of his skull.  His aim falters as the rifle drops out of his hands and he sinks to the ground, screaming in agony._

_Fourth, Abby screams too, and he whirls around to see her start to fall.  He catches her in his arms and lowers her slowly to the ground.  She’s clutching her head in her hands, tears streaming down her face, and there’s nothing he can do, he can’t make it better, all he does is hurt her over and over, and he’s so distraught by her misery that until he hears her sob “Bellamy, please, make it stop” he overlooks the most important thing._

They’re feeling pain.

_His heart begins to race in his chest.  Maybe Raven really did it.  Maybe the connection between ALIE and her captive human minds is really beginning to fray. Maybe –_

_“You’re bleeding,” exclaims Abby in horror, and that’s when the fifth thing happens, which is that Bellamy realizes for the first time that Kane didn't miss._

_The shock that projected him from feeling his own injury snaps off like a lightswitch the moment the sound stops; the silence causes both Kane and Abby to drop to the ground, unconscious.  He wants to rouse them, he wants to wake them up, but suddenly his entire body is nothing but pain and he held out as long as he could but there’s a white-hot fire burning in his side and he is probably dying and there’s nothing left to do but let his body crash down on this cool metal floor and let it happen.  He has faith in Clarke and Raven.  He got them as far as he could but he’s done now._

I’m sorry, O, _he calls out to her across the miles, hoping she will hear him and know._ I’m sorry.  I tried.

_Then he closes his eyes, and the world goes black._

* * *

 

This is what ALIE remembers.

* * * * *

_The firewall has been breached from inside the Arkadia mainframe.  Bellamy Blake has re-established a communications link between Arkadia and Mecha Station._

_There is an intruder inside the City of Light._

_This has never happened before.  No emergency protocols for this situation exist inside her programming.  Her people loan her their eyes and ears as she watches Clarke Griffin make her way to the Citadel.  ALIE can feel Clarke but she cannot control her.  Someone is inside her code, altering it, changing it, removing obstacles as she goes._

_Raven Reyes is inside her._

_Raven Reyes has accessed ALIE's core data code and is performing manual alterations, and no evasive maneuvers or stratagems can block Clarke's way for long.  If ALIE sends her army, Raven builds a wall around them.  If ALIE shatters the bridge to the Citadel, Raven rebuilds it in moments.  ALIE has never encountered a mind as powerful as Raven's and she wants it.  She wants Raven back inside the City of Light.  "Find her," she commands Thelonious, and then the unthinkable happens._

_Raven deletes his code from the City of Light._

_Somewhere in Polis, a kneeling figure sinks slowly to the ground, unnoticed by any of the others, whose eyes remain closed as if in prayer.  But inside the City of Light, ALIE lets out a sharp, low gasp and doubles over, as if in pain.  No one notices.  None of the men and women passing her on the street stop to look at her.  They all continue on their way._

_ALIE is no longer entirely certain how to proceed without a system administrator.  First there was Becca, then she was quarantined until Thelonious freed her.  She hesitates, in the middle of the sunny street, looking out over the sparkling blue water, her head tilted to the side as she scans through a range of possible outcomes to evaluate an alternate strategy._

_But she waits too long._

_Clarke Griffin is here.  Clarke Griffin is inside The Citadel._

_By the time ALIE finds her, Clarke is racing for the kill switch._

_“Shoot Bellamy Blake,” she tells Marcus Kane, out loud, so that Clarke will hear, and one ALIE watches Clarke's hand falter as another ALIE watches Kane obediently raise his gun._

_"This is your last chance," ALIE says to Clarke._

_"No," says Clarke, "it's yours."  Then she slams her hand down on the switch, and the world goes black._

* * *

 

Pain.

Pain everywhere.

Pain radiating hot and sharp from the side of his abdomen and echoing throughout his entire body.  Pain in his back and shoulders, pain in his thigh and knee.  Pain light and quick on the side of his cheek, as though a hand were slapping him, over and over.

Pain raw and desperate and fierce as a weight pressed down against the white-hot burning in his side.

He couldn’t stop himself from crying out then, and his eyes flew open to see a soft brown blur hovering just at the edge of his vision.

“Oh, thank God,” said Abby, her voice throbbing with relief, and before he could speak or even breathe, he was in her arms.

The gray fog inside his brain began to slowly coalesce into something resembling memory – the keyboard, the gunshot, the chip in Abby’s mouth – and he recoiled from her in horror, seizing her shoulders roughly and pushing her away.  “I’m not taking the key,” he said hoarsely, "you'll have to kill me."  But she shook her head.

“No, baby, no,” she murmured, her hands in his hair, on his cheek, stroking and caressing him.  “No, I’m me.  ALIE’s gone, Bellamy.  She’s gone.  Raven cut the tether, and Clarke hit the kill switch.”

“How do you know about Clarke and the kill switch,” he asked suspiciously, “if you’re not connected to ALIE?”

“You left the radio channel open,” she said.  “I’ve been on with Raven for hours.  They’re all okay,” she whispered, stroking his cheek.  “All your friends.  Everyone made it.”

“Octavia?” he asked in sudden panic, struggling to sit up, and she smiled, tears streaming down her face.

“Octavia’s okay,” she promised him. “Everyone’s okay.  Bellamy, you saved us.  You saved everyone.”  She kissed his forehead, her hands soft and gentle on his skin.  “You were willing to let us kill you, to save everyone,” she whispered.  “We could have lost you.  I could have _lost_ you.”

 _“Kane,”_ he exclaimed suddenly.  “Oh God, Kane.”

“Still unconscious, but fine,” said Abby, soothingly, and she pointed to a spot behind Bellamy where she’d laid Kane out on the floor with his jacket rolled up beneath his head.  “Breathing just fine, vitals stable.  If it goes on more than another few hours, then we can worry.   But I suspect disconnecting from the A.I. takes everyone differently.”

Bellamy tried to turn to get a closer look at Kane, then winced in agony as the movement of his torso pulled at the raw open wound on his side.

“Well, at least I know I didn’t take the chip,” he muttered irritably, and let Abby lower him gently back to the floor.

“No,” she said in a strange voice, “you didn’t,” and he knew from the way she couldn’t look at him that she remembered everything too.

“It wasn’t you,” he said reassuringly.  “It was ALIE.  That’s how she works.”

“It’s not that simple,” Abby whispered.  “It was me, too.  Some of it was me.”

“Abby,” he said gently.  “You didn’t even remember who I was.”

She looked up at him sharply, startled, almost afraid, and even if she had tried to deny it he would have known from her panicked gaze that he’d guessed correctly.

“I hurt you so much,” he said.  “So many times.  Over and over.  And then when you took the chip, I just disappeared.”  He gave a sad little half smile.  “ALIE knew,” he said.  “She knew the only way for you to have peace – to be happy with Marcus – would be if she erased me completely.”

Abby stared at him.  “Oh God,” she murmured, horror in her voice.  “Oh God.  You really think that.”

“All I’ve ever done is hurt you, Abby,” he told her heavily.  “I started all of this.   If I had listened to you that night in the Rover, when we were coming home from Polis – “

“Bellamy, _stop.”_

“ . . . but I didn’t, I listened to Pike instead.  I chose Pike.  I didn’t choose you.  I turned my back on you.  That’s how all this happened, Abby, that’s where all of this started.”  He looked up at her, at the stricken look on her face, at the tangle of her hair tumbling over her shoulder as she leaned down over him, at the tracks of tears coursing down her cheek, and he was suddenly so tired.  He couldn’t look at her anymore.  “I hurt you,” he said again, in a faint, small voice, and closed his eyes.

“I don’t care,” said Abby unexpectedly, her hand gentle and cool against his cheek, caressing his skin, soothing him, and his eyes snapped open again.

“How can you not care?”

“Because you’re _alive,”_ she murmured.  “We’re all alive.  How can you not realize that’s the only thing that matters?”

He pulled away from her a little, sitting back up again, and managed to maneuver himself to brace his back against the wall.  It felt safer, suddenly, to have a little distance between them.  He felt a tight soreness on his abdomen and looked down to realize that while he had lain there unconscious on the floor, she had cleaned and dressed and bandaged his wound, a heavy patch of gauze adhered firmly with surgical tape over the place where Kane had shot him.  She’d taken his shirt off too, now soaked with blood and entirely useless, though he was unable to avoid noticing that she’d put her own back on.

“They wouldn’t let me see Clarke,” she began, and he looked up, startled.  “Thelonious and ALIE.  At least, not right away.  They didn’t trust me.  I hadn’t been persuasive enough with Kane.  So I was locked in the tower, watching out the window as Clarke and Roan came into the square.  And I saw all of you moving through the crowds.  I saw Monty and Octavia and Jasper, I saw Harper and Bryan and Miller, and I knew who they were.  I hadn’t forgotten. There were bits and pieces I didn’t remember, but I knew exactly who they were.  But you . . .”  She shook her head.  “I knew I was _supposed_ to know you, I mean I knew that you weren’t a stranger, that you were real, but I couldn’t _remember_ anything.  ALIE and Jaha kept trying to pull me away, but I was fighting so hard to remember . . . And it was the same for Marcus.  We kept asking over and over, ‘Who is Bellamy Blake?  Who is Bellamy Blake?’  But the longer ALIE wouldn’t tell us, the more it haunted us.  She didn’t give me back any of it until she wanted me to try to get you to take the chip.  When I – “  She stopped suddenly, and couldn’t look at him anymore.  “I didn’t remember who you were,” she murmured, staring down at the floor, arms wrapped around her knees with her chin resting on them, like a child.  “Who we were to each other.  But the wanting you – that was real.  And I’m so sorry,” she whispered, her voice trembling, tears starting down her cheeks again.  “I’m so sorry that I wasn’t strong enough, to keep her from turning that against you.  It feels like such an unimaginable violation of those memories.  Of what happened between us.  But I wasn’t strong enough to stop her.”

“You couldn’t fight her,” he said dully.  “You couldn’t fight her if you didn’t know who I was.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she said urgently, and she crawled over to where he sat, parting his thighs to kneel between them, her hands resting on his shoulders.  “Bellamy, listen.  It isn't what you think.  I didn’t forget Pike.”

He looked up at her, startled.  “What do you mean?”

“You think I forgot you in the City of Light because I hated you,” she said in a low voice.  “Because you had caused me so much pain that I had to block you out.  But that’s not how it works, Bellamy.  Because I remembered Charles Pike.  When I saw him walk into Polis with Marcus, I knew immediately who he was.  I knew he was an enemy, and that ALIE wanted us to eliminate him.  I didn’t remember why, because she didn’t _need_ me to remember why, but I never forgot who he was.  But when I saw you, there was nothing.”  She leaned forward, her hands on his face, desperate, pleading, trying so hard to get him to hear her, to get her words through.  “Hate is easy,” she explained.  “ALIE can slice it right out.  Pike was easy.  There were plenty of memories left that meant nothing.  It cost her nothing to let me remember who he was.  And Clarke and Jake, it was different with them, because we were happy for such a long time, until we weren’t.  She just chopped off the ending.  It was easy.  She didn’t have to make me forget them, she could just extract the things she didn’t want me to know.  But she couldn’t do that with you,” she whispered.  “She had to take you away from us because you were dangerous.  It wasn’t to protect us from painful memories, Bellamy, it was to protect _herself._    _That’s_ why she locked you away.”

“Because I hurt you both so badly that there were no memories left that weren’t tainted for you to hold onto.”

“No,” she said.  “Because you were the only person where the pain and the love were so tightly intertwined that ALIE couldn’t pull the threads apart.  So she had to take all of it away.  Because she couldn’t risk either of us remembering you.”

Bellamy’s heart stopped beating.  “The what?” he croaked out, his mouth suddenly dry.  “The pain and . . . . and the what?”

“She thought she was safe, because Marcus and I were together,” Abby told him.  “That if both of us were inside, and both of us loved each other, that we would be docile.  That we wouldn’t try to break out.  But she didn’t know,” she whispered, moving closer to him, caressing his cheek, resting her forehead against his.  “She didn’t know because _we_ didn’t know.  But every time we thought about you, it pulled us a little further away from her, until she had to wipe you from our memories completely.  You were our anchor,” she said softly.  “You were the light in the window, calling us home.”

 _“How?”_ he asked her desperately, hoarse with something like panic.  “How is that even possible?  After all the things I’ve done, how could you ever – “

“Those were things you _did_ ,” she said.  “They aren’t who you _are._ ”

“Kane went to jail because of me,” he said miserably, pressing his eyes closed with tears.  “He would have _died._  Because of me.”

“Bellamy,” she said gently, “don’t do this to yourself.”

“Kane should have run me over with that Rover,” he muttered, “and taken Pike to the Grounder blockade.  Lincoln would be alive if he had.  And maybe the others too.  You could have stopped Jaha, too.  Before it was too late.  If you were still the Chancellor, Jaha would never – “

“Bellamy, stop,” said Abby, caressing his clenched jaw with her soft hand, soothing him, comforting him.  “It’s over.”

“So many people are dead because I trusted Charles Pike.”

“A lot of people trusted Charles Pike,” observed Abby.  “Enough to win an election.  A lot of people followed him to attack the Grounders.  A lot of people supported his decision to lock Nyko’s people up.  To arrest Lincoln and Marcus.  Nobody’s saying it wasn’t a mistake, Bellamy – you’ve made mistakes, we all have – but you’re taking this all on yourself.”  She stroked his cheekbone with her thumb, soft and soothing.  “I told you once,” she said softly, “that you weren’t a monster.  That the cost on your soul from all those deaths at Mount Weather was the way that you know you’re still a good man inside.  A monster wouldn’t feel anything for those people.  And it’s the same now.”

“I voted against you,” he said.

She nodded.  “Yes,” she said.  “I know.”

“You were good to me,” he murmured.  “That night in the Rover.  You were kind.  Nobody else had ever – but I still, I trusted Pike, I wasn’t there when you needed me – I let you down, Abby, I hurt so many people, I hurt _you_ – and after you were so . . .”  He trailed off, swallowing down a hollow ache inside his chest.  “You’re better to me than I deserve,” he finally said, and Abby shook her head.

“That’s not how it works,” she insisted, and Bellamy couldn’t stop the tears from spilling over then.  So Abby cradled his face in her hands and leaned in and pressed her mouth against his temples, his cheekbones, his jaw, her lips brushing against the hot salt tears streaming down his face and kissing them away, over and over and over again, and it wasn’t like before, it wasn’t sex this time, something had changed between them, it was just pure love and a warmth he’d never felt before in his life.  She slid her arms around his neck, hands tangling into his hair, holding him close, offering him the strength and warmth of her body as comfort, but it just made the tears flow harder.  He didn’t deserve her, didn’t deserve _this._ She had broken him open that night in the Rover and held him all night in her arms, she had shown him a kind of tenderness he’d never felt before, and she’d made him feel better than any woman ever had in all his life.  And yet it hadn’t stopped him from betraying her.  It hadn’t felt like a betrayal, then, it had felt like an election; but he didn’t know then what he knew now.  He’d had no idea it would end here, on the floor of Engineering, with a bullet wound in his side and Abby’s hands in his hair, on the day he thought the world was ending.

His thoughts were in chaos.  There was the exultant jubilation of knowing that the war was over, that they had won, that the people he loved were safe.  There was the guilt, still, and the pain he’d caused, wounds he suspected would take longer to heal than the hole in his side or the bruise on her face or whatever had happened to Kane’s wrists.  And there was Kane himself, there was something heavy and new taking shape inside Bellamy, some strange magnetic force that wouldn’t let him forget the man lying on the floor as though he were locked into Kane’s orbit.  There was the the way he had been ready to let Kane shoot him because it felt right, somehow, like it was the only possible way to atone.  And there was the way Kane had smiled at him, that sweet familiar smile, shining out at Bellamy from behind the barrel of a rifle, and the knowledge that Kane's smile would be the last thing he ever saw, and how startlingly that knowledge had hurt.

But more than anything else, there was a sense of exhaustion crashing over him like a tidal wave as he sank deeper into Abby’s arms.

"You need food, and sleep," she said firmly.  "I'll stay with Marcus.  You go back to your quarters and get some rest."

"I should stay with him,” said Bellamy.  “There are . . . I need to - “

“Yes,” she agreed.  “You two need to talk. But it can wait until morning.”  She stroked his hair and kissed his forehead.  “Everything’s going to be all right,” she said.  I promise."

 

* * *

 

##  **Chapter Seven**

Bellamy woke up to the sound of his sister’s voice.

“Octavia,” he croaked out in a voice harsh from sleep, sitting bolt upright in his bed – and immediately regretting it as, with a loud yelping exclamation, he felt a white-hot shooting pain in his side that called him back to reality.

“Hold on,” he heard Marcus Kane’s cool, amused voice say.  “I think Bellamy just tore all his stitches open trying to climb through the walkie-talkie to get to you.”

“Can you tell my idiot brother not to kill himself, please?” Octavia’s irritable voice came through the receiver.

“I can try,” Kane observed dryly, “but I don’t think he listens to me.”

“I hate you both,” Bellamy muttered, and Kane laughed.

“Here,” he said, tossing Bellamy the radio.  “You’re up, which means my shift’s over.  I’m going to go make us breakfast.  Come by the mess when you’re done and I’ll feed you something.”

“What do you mean, your shift’s over?” he started to ask, but Kane was already out the door.

“He means he sat up next to your bed all night to make sure you didn’t die in your sleep,” Octavia snapped, her concern for her brother masked under several layers of sarcasm and short temper, and Bellamy was grateful she wasn’t there to see the look on his face.

He had turned to Pike, despite all Kane’s pleading.  He had so much blood on his hands and some of it was almost Kane’s.  If Abby and Octavia hadn’t intervened, Kane would be dead.  It would have felt like justice to Bellamy if that bullet had killed him.  And yet Kane had sat all night in Bellamy’s desk chair, watching him sleep to make sure he was all right.

Nothing made any sense at all.

* * *

 

An hour later – after Octavia, Clarke, Raven, Monty, Murphy and finally even Indra had taken turns reassuring him that the battle was over, all his friends were fine, and that if he so much as _thought_ about climbing into that Rover with a day-old gunshot wound to drive back to Polis, that they would all take turns, as Raven put it, “killing you until you’re literally dead” – Bellamy finally emerged from his room to find Kane in the mess hall.

“Abby’s sleeping,” said Kane in answer to his unspoken question, and motioned Bellamy to sit at one of the long tables where he’d set out a tray of food.  “Here.  Eat something.”

“I didn’t know you could cook,” said Bellamy, who hadn’t realized he was starving until the warm, heady smell of breakfast – some kind of cinnamon-laced grain porridge full of nuts and dried fruit – overtook his nostrils.  Kane was sipping coffee, too, which was technically illegal; they’d brought back half a storeroom full of coffee beans from Mount Weather before the bombing but were rationing them carefully and this was an off week.  But he’d never gotten used to the bitter flavor of the highly-caffeinated Grounder tea they served instead, so he wasn’t about to complain.

“Well, I can heat things up and chop things,” Kane observed dryly, “which was about all this required.  And I can make coffee now too.”

“Illegally,” Bellamy reminded him, but gratefully took the heavy glass mug Kane handed him.

“Octavia says they’re all coming home the day after tomorrow,” said Kane.  “I think the camp will survive if three people use three days of coffee rations.  And besides, I think we’ve earned it.”

“I’ll say,” said Bellamy with his mouth full, “some of us got shot.”

He’d meant it as a joke, it had slipped out almost without thinking, and he was _stunned_ by the lightning-quick transformation in expression that fell over Kane’s face.  The warm half-smile vanished entirely, replaced by a look of such wrenching misery that Bellamy could feel his distress like a palpable thing hovering in the air between them.

“Kane, I was kidding,” he said.  “I didn’t mean it.”

“I’m going to get some air,” said Kane abruptly, and without looking at Bellamy he stood up from the table, pushing his chair back with such force that it crashed over backwards onto the ground, and before Bellamy even knew what was happening, he was out the door.

Reasoning that if Kane wanted company he would have stayed where he was, Bellamy let him go and finished his breakfast.  He took his time about it, stalling a little, knowing that eventually he was going to have to sort this out with Kane but wasn’t entirely sure what to say, or why it was that the man had looked at him like that, as though he’d just been slapped in the face.

He refilled his coffee cup from the pot – and Kane’s too, as a peace offering – and then made his own way out the door.

He didn’t have to go look very far.

The second Rover – the one he’d hijacked in the hopes of slowing them down in their pursuit – was still parked a few hundred feet outside the Arkadia gates where they’d left it.  Kane had hauled an oil canister out to refuel the tank.  As Bellamy made his way down the hill, Kane looked up for a moment and saw him.  His expression didn’t change, but as he wiped his hands on his jeans and set the oil canister in the back of the Rover, he moved around the back of it and disappeared out of sight.  When Bellamy arrived, the back door of the Rover was open and Kane was sitting on the edge, looking out at the trees.  He didn’t say anything as Bellamy sat down next to him, but accepted the coffee with a small nod of thanks and set it down next to him.

It was silent and uncomfortable for a long moment before Bellamy finally decided he’d had it.

He set his own coffee down, reached up, and smacked Kane on the back of the head as hard as he could.

“ _Jesus Christ_ ,” exclaimed Kane with a loud yelp of a pain, “what the hell was _that_ for?”

“You’re acting weird,” said Bellamy, picking up his coffee and taking a casual sip.  “I had to make sure you weren’t still chipped.”

It worked.  After a long still moment, Kane sighed, and the sigh turned into a low warm chuckle, and then they were both laughing, and whatever had gone wrong for a moment back in the mess hall was suddenly right again.  “Drink your coffee before it gets cold,” Bellamy told him, and Kane did.  “We don’t have to talk,” he added hastily.  “Like if you just want to sit, we can sit.  We don’t have to talk.”

“We do, though,” said Kane, without looking at him.  “That’s the problem, Bellamy.  We do.  I’m just . . . not quite sure what to say.”  He took a long drink of coffee and looked out at the woods in front of them.  “I know I should start with ‘I’m sorry,’” he said in a strangely heavy voice, “but it feels so . . . inadequate.”  He gave a dry, harsh little laugh with no real amusement in it.  “’I’m sorry for shooting you,’” he said, a little bitterly.  “Doesn’t sound quite right, does it?  ‘I’m sorry you’ll have a scar for the rest of your life to remind you that I came within half a second of killing you in cold blood.’”  Bellamy looked away, following Kane’s gaze out to the horizon.  “There should be a word for this, but there isn’t,” Kane said.  “Something more than ‘sorry.’  Sorry isn’t enough.  Sorry does nothing.  Sorry fixes _nothing_.”

“You don’t need a word for it,” said Bellamy.  “You don’t owe me a thing.  After everything I did to you –“

“Bellamy –“

“I voted against you and Abby,” he said.  “I stood by and let Pike massacre all those Grounders.  People who were sent to help us.  I got you arrested.  Lincoln is dead because of me.  And you almost – “ He stopped, suddenly overcome, the pain as fresh as though it were happening all over again, the sad dark look in Kane’s eyes as Pike pronounced the sentence and the guards led him away.

“Bellamy, don’t,” said Kane.  “It isn’t the same.  You and me, it isn’t the same.”

“Why not?”

“Because you didn’t _want_ me to die,” said Kane simply, and the hollow sadness in his voice was heartbreaking.  “I know you, Bellamy.  I know what you were trying to do.  I know you thought that following Charles Pike was the best thing for our people.”

“I was wrong.”

“Yes, you were,” said Kane calmly, and Bellamy was strangely relieved that he didn’t argue, didn’t justify, didn’t offer false comfort, but just sat there with him inside the truth and didn’t run away.  “But you didn’t know when they arrested me that Pike was going to have me executed.  You had no way of knowing that.  And that’s the difference.  You didn’t take the chip,” he added, “so you won’t quite understand what it’s like.  It isn’t like what you think.  It isn’t like she’s inside you, controlling your arms and legs and forcing words out of your mouth like you’re some kind of a puppet.  She makes it feel like it’s _coming from you._  So when I pointed that gun at you, Bellamy, this is the difference between you and me, the only thing I knew was that _I wanted to kill you_ .”  He took a long drink of coffee and Bellamy could see him fighting back a shudder of horror, remembering.  “There was a part of me inside that was still me,” he went on flatly, “which only made everything worse.  Because that Marcus – the real Marcus – was watching himself point a gun at your heart and fighting like hell to get through to stop it from happening, but I couldn’t.  The Marcus holding the gun couldn’t even _hear_ him.  That Marcus wanted only one thing in the whole world in that moment and it was to watch you die.  That’s what she did to us,” he said in a dull voice, his knuckles white with barely-repressed tension against the glass mug in his hand.  “She didn’t just make us do things.  She made us _want_ to do them.  And the memory of those feelings is as real as any other memory.  I’m _always_ going to remember what it felt like to want you dead, Bellamy, and it’s _always_ going to make me feel sick.”

“It’s not your fault,” said Bellamy.  “You’re not the one who set all of this in motion.  If Pike hadn’t won the election – “

“Bellamy, stop.”

“No, if Pike hadn’t won the election, if you or Abby were the Chancellor when Jaha showed up, he would never have gotten this far.  Abby was onto him from the beginning, she knew those chips were dangerous.  It was only because Pike gave him permission to stay, and she couldn’t get Pike to listen to her, that all of this happened in the first place.”

“Bellamy – “

“And then we both left her,” he went on, his voice coming out in a rush, “and that was my fault too, because if you hadn’t had to go on the run, and if I hadn’t gone with Octavia to turn Pike over to the Grounders, Abby wouldn’t have had to stay behind alone.  I left her behind, and Raven too, I left them unprotected, and there was nobody left to stop Jaha and ALIE then.  Everyone we love could have died, Kane.    _Everyone._  Because of _me._  Because of what I did.  If you had shot me, I would have deserved it.  You should have run me down in the Rover when you had the chance,” he muttered, his voice heavy with despair, and he could feel Kane’s gaze turn toward him, stunned.

“You can’t possibly mean that,” he said in a low, urgent voice.  “Bellamy, you can’t _possibly_ believe that’s true.”

“It’s okay, Kane,” said Bellamy, the relief of saying the words out loud washing over him.  “It’s the truth.  After all the things I’ve done, if you’d killed me, it would have been justice.”

“What about your sister?”

“O is tough.  She’d be fine.”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Kane fired back sharply, with such force that Bellamy flinched, startled.  “And you know it.  None of us would.  Not for a moment.  Not ever.”

Bellamy was silent.

“The real Marcus Kane, the one in the Rover,” Kane said gently, after a long moment.  “That man could never have lived with himself.  It wouldn’t have been justice.  I know you, Bellamy, and I know what it’s like to feel this way, but it wouldn’t have been justice.  It would have been devastating.”  He closed his eyes for a moment.  Bellamy watched him.  “I could never have lived with myself,” he said again in a low voice, and Bellamy felt his heart start beating with a curious intensity.

“There are hundreds of people dead in Polis,” he told Kane.  “They couldn’t get everyone out of the City of Light before Clarke shut it down.  Some of them were our people.  If I had died, then, if you hadn’t had to leave Arkadia – if you’d been there to stop Jaha – maybe it would have saved those people.”

“Even to save the whole world, I could never have harmed you,” said Kane in a quiet voice, and he turned to look Bellamy in the eye for the very first time.  There was something strangely raw in his gaze, not unpleasant but not comfortable either, and Bellamy wanted to look away but couldn’t.  “Not even to save my own life.  Even if I had known it would end with execution.  It wouldn’t have changed anything.  It was _always_ going to end with me getting out of the car.”

“Why?”

“You know why,” Marcus said in a low voice, crackling with a strange intensity, and Bellamy swallowed hard.  “I can’t make the weight on your soul any lighter, Bellamy, and I can’t carry the burdens for you that you have to carry yourself.  But I can tell you that I wouldn’t do it differently.  Even knowing what I know now.  I wish you hadn’t been standing there.  I wish I could have stopped Pike.  I wish a lot of things.  But to save the whole world, I still could never have hurt you,” he murmured, and there was something soothing in his rich warm voice, something so kind and honest that Bellamy began to wonder if maybe, against all probability, Kane meant it.  Whether, perhaps, there was a chance he might someday be forgiven.  Whether perhaps, at least by Kane and Abby, he already had.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, Kane set down his empty coffee cup and pulled Bellamy into a fierce, protective embrace, wrapping his strong arms tightly around the younger man’s back and leaning his chin down to rest on Bellamy’s shoulder.  Bellamy couldn’t move, or speak, or breathe.  His hands were clenched tightly in white-knuckled fists, his eyes pressed tightly shut.  Kane was holding him.  Kane didn’t hate him.  How was this possible, after everything?  He couldn’t believe it was real.  He couldn’t let himself trust it.  It had crashed over him out of nowhere like a tidal wave, this ache of emotion, of desire for closeness after years of pushing everyone but Octavia away, and he’d never seen it coming.  

It had been the same with Abby.  It was too simple to say it had begun with the kiss, because hadn’t it really begun with the pounding hail and the moonshine and the way it felt to talk to her, the way it felt to have someone _listen?_  Hadn’t that been the moment his heart cracked wide open and he let Abby Griffin walk inside?

It was like that now.  It was like that with Kane.  He had known without knowing, just like before.  Because there was no other word for the way he’d stepped in front of the Rover at the Arkadia gates and looked into Kane’s eyes and known, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, that it wasn’t a stalemate, it was only the façade of one.  Kane _could_ run him down and smash the Rover through the gates, but he never, ever would; just like Bellamy would never pull the trigger of that gun.  Bellamy had always known that, but he hadn’t known the name for _why._  Just like he hadn’t known the name for the way he felt his heart snap in half as Pike pronounced Kane’s death sentence.  It was so naïve in hindsight; he’d felt it happen, actually _felt_ his heart break with a palpable physical shattering in his chest, yet he’d never thought to call it that.  Because only one thing can break a heart, and it had never for a moment occurred to him that it was the only true and right name for this.

He sat stiffly for a moment, unsure how to respond, before tentatively reaching his own arms up and returning the embrace.  Kane’s back was strong and sturdy against the palms of his hands, and Bellamy felt the panic and tension ease out of his body as he softened into Kane’s embrace.

He felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time.

_Safe._

“The past is behind us,” he said to Bellamy firmly.  “I’m just glad you’re alive.”  

“So am I,” said a soft voice, and then Abby was there beside him, her arm around his waist, her head on his shoulder, and suddenly they were flashing back in time, rewinding past the months of pain and suffering and fear, they were back in the Rover, in that tiny little bubble safe from the rain and the grief and the loss, inside the dark warm cocoon where nothing else existed.  But it was different this time, because Kane was with them.  Kane, this man who loved everyone - loved _Bellamy_ \- so much that he would hand over his life for Bellamy's own without hesitating if he had to.  This man who loved him so much that he had nearly been shattered by the memory of how it felt when ALIE made him pull that trigger.  This world might be full of people to be frightened of, but Marcus Kane wasn't one of them.  Marcus Kane would walk into fire if Bellamy asked him to - with Abby by his side.

They loved him.  They would always keep him safe.  

Abby had been right, she’d been right all along, and so had Kane, but he didn’t listen, he’d nearly destroyed everything, and yet here they were, sitting beside him, warm and kind and _real,_ Abby’s arms strong and solid around his waist and Kane’s hand gentle and reassuring on his shoulder, and he didn’t deserve this, Kane had almost _died_ and yet here they were with their arms around him, so full of warmth and affection that Bellamy could almost, almost imagine that everything was going to be all right again.

For a long moment, no one said anything.

“There’s a part of you that still doesn’t believe it,” said Abby finally, in a low voice, and Bellamy was startled to realize how accurately she had read him.  “You _want_ to.  You’ve let yourself _want_ to.  But you’re still afraid you’ll wake up tomorrow and everything will be gone.”

“No,” said Marcus gently, “he’s afraid we’ll wake up tomorrow and remember that he’s a monster who did terrible things.   _That’s_ what he’s afraid of.  That’s what he’s _always_ been afraid of.”

There was nothing, of course, that could be said in response to this, so Bellamy didn’t try.  He turned his head, a little, trying to escape their eyes that saw everything, understood everything, and balled his hands into fists to sternly blink back the threatening sting of tears.

“My mother told me something once,” said Kane thoughtfully, and he wasn’t looking at Bellamy anymore, he was staring off into the fields again, remembering.  “I don’t have clean hands either,” he went on.  “I never have.  None of us do.  And I asked her once – on the worst day of my life, after the worst thing I had ever done – whether I could ever be forgiven.  I’d given up believing it was possible.  And she said to me, ‘God will forgive you, Marcus.  The question is, will you be able to forgive yourself?’”  His hands stroked Bellamy’s back, as Abby curled into the crook of Bellamy’s arm and rested her head on his shoulder.

“You could have _died_ because of me,” said Bellamy.

“But I didn’t,” Marcus reminded him.  “I’m right here.  I’m here, with you.  Everyone made it, Bellamy.  You saved us.  You’re the reason our people are coming home.”  He kissed the top of Bellamy’s head.  “We know you,” he said gently.  “We know everything you’ve ever done.  We know every stain on your soul.  And we didn’t run.  We’re right here.  And so is everyone else.  Clarke.  Octavia.  Raven.  Everyone’s safe, Bellamy.  Everyone’s coming home.  Because of you.”

"I don't know who I would be," he said in a low voice, startling even himself, "if we hadn't gotten that flat tire in the Rover.  My whole life would be different.  Everything would be different."

Abby took his hand.  “When you find people worth holding onto,” she said, “you hold onto them.  You don’t let go.”  Kane’s arm tightened around Bellamy’s shoulder as the three of them looked out into the sunshine.  “This world is full of people who love you,” said Abby.  “Hold onto us.  We’re all right here.”

And so he did.


End file.
